constellations and memories

Lecture by Annabelle Aventurin in the context of Art and Film Semester looking at Film and Memory.

The aim of this lecture is to address the issue of archival research in the Afro-diasporic context, based on the mapping of the film and paper collection of Franco-Mauritanian director Med Hondo, which I was able to work on during my four years in charge of circulating and promoting his cinema. Another concrete approach will be my recent research into the CIDIHCA archives (Centre international de documentation et d’information haïtienne, caribéenne et afro-canadienne), and the questions I was confronted with. Methodologies can be derived from this context.

The purpose is to see how these same research and archiving methodologies can be extended to the practice of programming. We’ll start from the concrete case of film programs entitled Non-aligned film archives, where each session focuses on a particular surviving,forgotten, censored, lost work, script or note. We’ll look at the confrontations with different film archives and collections, the difficulties, gaps and obstacles that make up the history of these minority, parallel and surviving cinemas.
Finally, we’ll look at the influence of my work as an archivist in the making of my first documentary essay, Le Roi n’est pas mon cousin in 2022.

Annabelle Aventurin is a film archivist who works and lives between Paris and Marseille. Specializing in the preservation and valorization of films, she notably worked on the conservation of the works of director Med Hondo between 2020 and the end of 2023. Her passion for the issues surrounding archival film memory has led her to collaborate regularly on projects as a researcher-documentalist, where she combines technical expertise with documentary research.
As a programmer, Annabelle Aventurin takes part in various festivals and spaces dedicated to cinema, such as the Open City Documentary Festival, Aalst Netwerk, UnionDocs as well as Maysles, contributing to the circulation of rare films and archival footage. In 2022, she directed her first documentary essay, Le Roi n’est pas mon cousin (30’), which was screened in festivals and venues around the world.