POSTCOLONIAL MOTION: TAXIS AND TRAVELOGUES
While not as long-standing as the romance with trains, cinema has a love affair with taxis. A cab ride is often more than just a means of getting from one place to another. The taxi is a cinematic apparatus in motion, a confessional, an urban microcosm, a transition, a temporary intimacy, an archive of daily life, a nightmare of forced conversation, an eavesdropper's dream. Yet beneath such metaphors are material threats: the gig economy, prior and enduring precarities and exploitation of labor, movements of migration conditioned by colonization. POSTCOLONIAL MOTION: TAXIS AND TRAVELOGUES draws together three films combining oral testimonies and the kinetics of transport. Frank Sweeney, Karimah Ashadu, and Timoteus Anggawan Kusno each consider the movements of people, goods and images, tracing how workers warp the barriers of historical categories and economic constraints as they cross borders. Guest-programmed by Yasmina Price, who wrote the introduction and individual film descriptions. Frank Sweeney GO YE AFAR 2026, 24 min, DCP Irish research-based artist Frank Sweeney's latest work, GO YE AFAR (2026), stages a historical examination of economy, religion, national identity, and state power through the nocturnal taxi journey of a Nigerian driver in Dublin and Calabar. Making a link between the IMF's role in imposing a debt structure on Ireland in the 2010s and the economic dependency still inflicted on the African continent, Sweeney makes a taxi journey an illuminating lens onto the dubious legacies of Catholic missionaries and European philanthropy, global privatization and the erosion of the commons. Karimah Ashadu BROWN GOODS 2020, 12 min, DCP BROWN GOODS (2020), by British-born Nigerian artist and director Karimah Ashadu, both shares and reconfigures a similar terrain. The film scans the intermingled economies and geographies of Africa and Europe, conjuring Nigeria from its viewpoint in Germany. The setting is specifically Hamburg, a hub of international trade and multinational corporations. Ashadu's agile camerawork delves through docks, weaving amongst ship containers and stacks of tires as Emeka – the self-sufficient central figure, excluded from formal work due to his humanitarian status – voices a sharp analysis of manufacturing and industrial monopolies, the politics of resources and global capital. Timoteus Anggawan Kusno OBSCURA 2026, 14 min, DCP Indonesian filmmaker and visual artist Timoteus Anggawan Kusno's OBSCURA (2026) echoes the unsettling, spectral dreaminess and mediatized archival memory of GO YE AFAR. Operating between Indonesia and the Netherlands, the film critically reworks the form of the ethnographic travelogue and colonial imagery through a story of theft (another kind of informal job). Gallery workers liberate a painting and carry it out in a truck, performing how images physically travel, are taken apart, literally unframed and reframed. The screening will be followed by a conversation with filmmaker and artist Frank Sweeney!