Uncolonial Film Festival

IMPORTANT NOTICE:
We are currently in the final stage of our selection process. Our notification date has shifted due to bureaucratic obstruction from the University of Münster around our venue confirmation, which has consumed significant organisational capacity over the past months. We are navigating this while continuing to build the programme.

Uncolonial Film Festival—An international short film program exploring anti-colonial cinema, memory, land, and resistance.

*We invite you to take a moment to read the following before submitting your film.

Five days of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BiPoC)-led cinema that refuses colonial frameworks. Short films confronting empire, experimenting with form, and rejecting institutional gatekeeping. August 2026 in Münster, Germany. Organized by the BiPoC Referat, University of Münster.

This is anticolonial cinema on our terms.

What We Center?
We center short films by BiPoC filmmakers confronting empire—past and present. Work that challenges whose stories matter, whose aesthetics count as cinema, whose visions shape the future.
We refuse trauma as spectacle. We refuse NGO narratives. We refuse making our work digestible for institutions that have never served us.
Five days: films, dialogues, performances. Space claimed, not borrowed.

Why Münster?
Münster is not an innocent backdrop. The city is entangled with German colonial projects that asserted cultural and political supremacy in Africa, Asia and elsewhere, and those histories still shape its streets, institutions and memory.
We locate this festival in Münster because anticolonial work must confront the specific places that reproduce colonial power. We are claiming space in a university and a city embedded in these histories, insisting that our struggles belong here, not somewhere else or in more comfortable language.

What Uncolonial Means?
Uncolonial is a position, not a theme.
The colonial gaze still controls cinema: which stories get funded, who enters the archive, whose aesthetics count as "world cinema" and whose remain invisible. Distribution networks, funding bodies, festival circuits, criticism, canonization—all built to center whiteness and Europe.
We refuse imperial narratives, extractive storytelling, and institutional gatekeeping. We're building infrastructure: reclaiming image-making, narrative control, and space itself.

[ Thematic Programme Blocks ]

To give filmmakers a sense of how we think about the programme, here are the thematic areas we are building around. You do not select a category when submitting — the selection committee programmes films collectively based on the work itself and how films speak to each other. But these themes may help you understand what we are looking for and whether your work speaks to this festival.

Land, Extraction, Memory
Films engaging with colonial and neocolonial relationships to land, resource extraction, and ecological violence — work that traces how territory is stolen, poisoned, and contested, and how communities resist, hold, and reclaim their connection to place across generations.

Diaspora, Exile, Refusal
Films exploring displacement, forced migration, and the experience of living between worlds — work that sits inside that condition honestly, whether in grief, anger, ambivalence, or survival, and that carries within it the daily acts of resistance that displacement does not extinguish.

Form as Weapon
Experimental, essay, and hybrid works that use form itself as an act of resistance — films that challenge what cinema looks, sounds, and feels like, that refuse dominant film language, and that insist on aesthetics the mainstream circuit would never fund or canonise.

Futures / Otherwise
Films rooted in specific struggles, communities, and geographies that open toward what we are building — work that understands resistance not as a moment but as a continuity, and that holds the present and the possible at the same time. Not optimism. Not closure. A different orientation.
All selected films are equally valued. These blocks are curatorial tools for building a coherent programme, not rankings or competitive categories.