Bouchra Khalili

A global portrait documenting the year's events, Cinetracts '20 features the work of an international lineup of 20 filmmakers. Capturing the zeitgeist in their own backyard, the artists' short films are the culmination of a year-long residency project.

Somewhere between documentary and fiction, this is an essay on questions of territory and human displacements made during an excursion from southern Spain to northern Morocco. Travelling on the Mediterranean rim, we hear immigrants tell their stories.

Foreign Office focuses on the period during which Algiers – between 1962 and 1972– became the “mecca of revolutionaries”, hosting representations of many liberation movements from Africa, Asia and the Americas, such as Eldridge Cleaverʼs International Section of the Black Panther Party, Mandelaʼs ANC, or the PAlGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) founded by Amilcar Cabral. Taking as a starting point this forgotten past of post-independence era and internationalism, Foreign Office, invites to reflect on history and its transmission, and on emancipation as essentially linked to poetry. The film shows two young Algerians “re-writing” this history through images, language, and orality, articulating an historiography defined by “cinematic montage” as well as by translation as forms of writing, investigating, and reflecting on history and its resonances.


Three Athenians from different backgrounds form a group in Athens to examine the current state of Greece, Europe, and the Mediterranean.

Questions and Answers is a previously film, produced at the end of shooting The Tempest Society, which questions, with a certain degree of self-criticism, the effects of public performance.

The Storytellers brings together former members of Al Assifa and Al Halaka performing fragments of their spoken repertoire.

On one hand an exploration of the Bosphorus as a “continuous drift” between Europe and Asia; on the other, the tale (recounted via voiceover) of Anya, an undocumented Iraqi who has lived in the region for 12 years awaiting a visa to Australia.

Bouchra Khalili’s meditation on revolutionary histories considers the poet Jean Genet’s secret 1970 visit to the United States at the invitation of the Black Panther Party.

Bouchra Khalili is interested in the Mediterranean as a space of nomadism and itinerancy. Her work renders it in its subjective aspect by documenting the realities and narratives of migration, offering an alternative mapping based on the personal testimony of clandestine migrations. Mapping Journeys is a series of documentary works telling eight stories. Each presents a static shot of a map of the territory concerned, on which the traveller's hand sketches his or her journey. The accompanying voice has no face, as clandestinity requires: testimony to the invisibility of those at home nowhere and to the loss of identity this brings.