Pacifico + Penkelemes + Local Sensations
Three short films by artists about desire, the gaze and power in the shadow of colonial structures: 'Pacifico' by Daniel Duque, 'Penkelemes' by Onyeka Igwe and 'Local Sensations' by Tulapop Saenjaroen.
Pacífico
Daniel Duque / France & Colombia / 2026 / World Premiere / 22 min
Pacífico is the name of a region, but also that of a force. A land where music accompanies life, where one can be reborn.
In the waters of Colombia’s Pacific coast, life is celebrated through a particular kind of song: the Arrullos. This music honors life in a territory marked by violence and armed conflict, where enslaved people once found refuge at the end of colonial rule. In these same waters, each year, thousands of whales arrive from Antarctica to give birth. Pacífico weaves a polyphonic narrative around birth in an aquatic space where body, territory, and memory are deeply intertwined.
Penkelemes
Onyeka Igwe / Nigeria & United Kingdom / 2025 / International Premiere / 18 min
Onyeka Igwe’s new film work is a post-colonial analysis that unfolds the complex history of a university in Nigeria, built under imperial rule.
The University of Ibadan was created in 1948 in south western Nigeria to produce docile and compliant colonial subjects, there to serve the interests of the imperial core. Post national independence, it flourished – proffering a new image conjugated by Nigerian thought and culture for a brief and bright moment. But then war came, British funding was withdrawn, and Nigeria’s economic independence was funneled into Western mandated streams, draining the university of its promise. At the same time it is the protagonist in a real life fairytale of social mobility that provides many the opportunity to assert an identity in contradiction to a predestined path. Allowing for self possession, mobility, independence and new horizons.
Local Sensations
Tulapop Saenjaroen / Thailand / 2026 / European Premiere / 25 min
An elegant and thought-provoking film shot in graceful black-and-white images that move from room to room in an exploration of location, architecture, and monuments.
Shot on black-and-white 16mm film, ‘Local Sensations’ opens a loose, playful dialogue with Chatri Prakitnonthakan’s essay, ‘How to Design a Modern Monument That Won’t Become a Shrine’. Rather than illustrating the text, the film generates pluralities – unraveling the dichotomy of object and subject – and gestures toward a kind of topological politics. Though it circles around ideas of monuments, monumentality, and sanctification in Thai society, no statues or literal monuments ever appear. Instead, the film drifts through an arborist’s walking tour, a glassblowing workshop, a drawing game among architecture students, a multi-instrument improviser, a recreation center with its non-human inhabitants, and a snow town in a theme park.