This two-fold film programme hosted at Kriterion as part of The Broken Pitcher Forum shares projects that grapple with displacement, not as a closed past but as an ongoing condition. Through documentary, the filmmakers stay with struggle, collective resistance, and the spiritual life of affected communities. Across different localities — areas in Cape Town and Cairo — and in the afterlives of forced removal and erasure of life and living, the projects bear witness to places and peoples dispossessed by colonial and state power. The screenings will be followed by a Q&A in the presence of the filmmakers.

In 1960s South Africa, a close-knit community from Die Vlakte was forcibly and violently uprooted to make way for the Stellenbosch University as part of the Apartheid regime’s segregation measures. José Cardoso’s What the Soil Remembers recounts the traumatic effect displacement had on residents by bringing to the foreground a university that is still grappling with its racist legacy. To this day, the Die Vlakte community is fighting for justice and seeking reparations with little to no tangible solutions.

Fables for the Flood is a programme of experimental documentary films by Abdo Zin Eldin and Mahdy Abo Bahat, shot between 2016 and 2024 in Cairo and rural Upper Egypt. The programme contains excerpts of projects still in progress along with the duo's first work, The Goose's Excuse (2023). It is a first attempt by the duo to bring together different fragments of their work that mount a grave urgency to capture beings, time, and worlds threatened by disappearance in Egypt. Moving between the spiritual, the rural, and the urban, Fables for the Flood trace spiritual realities, cloaked behind a fragile terrestrial world anguished by separations and marked by erasure.

Tickets will soon be available through Kriterion's website.