Radical Love
Curators: Filma collective; text: geo
Illustration: Double Cherry
All films are screened in the original language with Ukrainian subtitles (SDH) and English subtitles. Audio description in Ukrainian is available for the film “Decision”.
This program is composed of films that we chose out of 60 submissions from nearly 20 countries. Originally we thought of it as an opportunity to show how diverse feminist movies can be, but then we understood that our selections have a common theme: radical love.
It is hard to give a simple, unified definition of radical love. Clearly, the concept is not about the individualized heteronormative environment produced by capitalism. It is a system of beliefs, a theoretical framework, and a set of practices that center love as the core value of all interactions between people or communities and between them and nature, unlike the capitalist patriarchal colonial system that structures those interactions through violence, control and exploitation. Black feminists from the USA have made great contributions to conceptualizing radical love. Theorist and black feminist bell hooks in her essay “Love as the Practice of Freedom” summed up what it means to choose love as a core value: “The moment we choose to love, we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love, we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. That action is the testimony of love as the practice of freedom”. Also, radical love is about healing yourself from traumas inflicted by oppressive systems through self-love, reflection on privilege and unlearning patterns of toxic behavior. Radical love is about solidarity between oppressed groups and solidarity with oppressors who are willing to dismantle dominant systems or undo the damage they have caused. Radical love is about caring for yourself, your communities and the planet.
Each of the selected movies in the “Radical Love” program displays various aspects of radical love using its own cinematic language. Zara Zandieh’s “Octavia’s Visions” takes us to a the dawn of a queer utopia where everyone canrediscover themselves beyond coloniality, capitalism and compulsory cisheteronormativity. In the movie “A Quiet Resistance” Therese Koppe shows through the story of Erika and Christine how kinships and communities built around love and care can resist patriarchy, authoritarianism, and capitalism. Pushpa Rawat and Anupama’s Srinivasan’s “Decision” unfolds the potential power of empathy, love and care as a strategic stand against conservative social norms. In her “Little Red Riding Hood” Tatiana Mazú González demonstrates that relationships between generations are not always antagonistic and that love and care in this area can potentially resolve into new solidarities. Experimental work “postDIY” by lucine talalyan and Shushan Avagyan reveals how non-heterosexual corporality and intimacy can be politically charged in post-Soviet space.
We hope that the films in this program inspire you to move towards freedom with radical love.
The Radical Love programme was created as the Filma collective were looking for films that balance their artistic statements with their political stances. We have put a special focus on the cinema that is sensitive to the filmed subjects, where the directors reflect on their experiences and/or prefer the slow filmmaking defying the notions of commercial and symbolic success within the film industry. The concept of radical love has helped us combine such different films into a single programme without assigning a particular positionality to the directors and their films.