Territoires – Filmtranskripte

First monographic publication on Brigitta Kuster’s films about the legacy of the German colonial project in Cameroon and Germany. The focus will be on the films made between 2006 – 2016 as part of the project Choix d’un passé (with Moïse Merlin Mabouna). The publication contains film texts and scripts in German, French and English translation as well as film clips, stills and research materials.

Brigitta Kuster and Moïse Merlin Mabouna met in 2001 about three hours outside Berlin at the camp for asylum seekers in Zerbst, to which Mabouna was assigned when he arrived in Germany from Cameroon. This led to a collaboration that subsequently explores the largely hidden legacy of Germany’s colonial involvement in Cameroon. “We really understand memory as individual. You can’t share it like a meal, but there are forms of messaging; you can try to communicate something to others,” Kuster writes about this project, which began with a double “haunting”: for Mabouna, a diffuse memory emerged. The “Germans” he learned to “admire” in his youth and who now subjected him to a humiliating bureaucracy in Germany were also the protagonists in a family story handed down to him by his ancestors: in 1892, his great-grandfather Bisselé Akaba led the resistance against colonial conquest and was subsequently captured, tortured and killed. The effort to share each other’s stories became a challenge to understand the markings that colonial violence has left on both of them as subjects, but without letting it completely define their communication.