Togo, Cameroon, Tanzania, Namibia: The five-part documentary series (the intro linked here forms the first part) visits the areas on the African continent formerly colonized by Germany by force. And asks:
“What role does the colonial past play in the African present?”
The project originated in 2016 as a series of events at the University of Bayreuth as part of the annual “BIGSAS Festival of African and African-Diasporic Literatures.” The theme of the festival at the time, the artistic practice of “re-mixing,” became stylistic for the further course of the project, which in the second half of the year moved to West, East, and Southern Africa with series of events and the documentary presented here.
The makers of the documentary, Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard (idea, script, production) and Nicolas Grange (direction, camera, editing) write about the central content concerns of their films:
“ReMIX’s structuring themes in the film series included the enslavement trade as a precursor to colonialism, as well as the recurring thematic clusters of mission and colonial land grabbing, economic exploitation and forced labor, war and genocide, forms of colonial domination and collaboration, military and civil resistance, medical experimentation and racist research, and the theft of bones and artifacts.”
The project was administered by the University of Bayreuth and funded by the German Federal Foreign Office.