concept

Cinelogue provides a collaborative space for film curation, global streaming, and critical dialogue around cinema, representation, and politics by presenting cinema by the Global Majority (Black people, Indigenous people, and People of Color, who make up over 80% of the world’s population).

Cinelogue represents, revives, and celebrates critically acclaimed and emerging filmmakers from countries and communities within Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania. While many filmmakers on our platform put issues of race, gender, and class (amongst many other forms of oppression) at the center of their filmmaking practice, others are lighter stories or satires made for joy.

For the first 100 titles of our recently launched film library we collaborated with an external team of curators, who hold diverse regional foci in the independent cinema landscape and carefully sourced a selected number of films under a chosen theme. The titles will be released throughout the first library year until Fall 2024.

Next to our library films, we aspire to produce curated programs in collaboration with curators, film collectives and scholars who have a special relation to the program and create a unique dialogue through and between the showcased films. We anticipate our next program to be released in May 2024.

Cinelogue shares 50% of the subscription revenue with all filmmakers or independent licensors, whose works are showcased on our platform. They also have the option to choose countries or regions they wish to make their films available for free. 

starting point

Cinelogue seeks to act as a curated intervention that challenges the status quo of cinema and reinforces the discourse around anti-colonialism within the film industry by centering the works of BIPOC filmmakers from the Global Majority.

Our approach is guided by the continued effects of colonialism on global social and political dynamics. The hegemonic forces of the so-called Global North are well established and continue to threaten the autonomy and empowerment of countries over which they, to this day, hold much political, economic, and social power. The Euro-American film and entertainment industries continue to produce cinema that fails to challenge European perceptions that often find their roots in colonization.

The widely accepted binary and hierarchical categories of ‘foreign film’ or ‘world cinema’ only serve as a continuation of colonial relations. They project the non-western world as a homogenous space without diversity, specificity, and complexity. This results in the visual consumption of films by the Global Majority as something to be passively gazed upon rather than actively seen.

moving forward

Cinelogue invites viewers to reimagine how to watch films by communities and filmmakers of the Global Majority. We want to bring forward a localized understanding and inter-regional connections between different films and their makers.

Cinelogue is committed to showcasing filmmakers who use film as a political and artistic vehicle. The carefully curated films center the lived experiences of those most affected by systems of social, cultural, and state oppression, such as religious and ethnic minorities, women, working class people, and people with diverse sexual orientations and gender identities.

The films, discourses, and stories featured on this platform allow us to engage with complex layers of inner and outer truths tied to the larger societies, histories, and collective trauma of places.

Our team is dedicated to continuing the distributuon process of these works by collaborating with professional translators from the Global Majority and providing subtitles in diverse languages that include those most spoken in the regions the films originate in. We want our audience to feel inspired and curious about new and innovative ways of accessing independent cinema, and we hope to make our contribution to changing the narrative.

contributors

Cinelogue’s contributors foreground a political stance that is, broadly speaking, rooted in the genealogies of film studies, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory. Our aim is to breathe new life into discourses around cinema as a vehicle for sociopolitical change.

While we are committed to speaking and raising awareness about current socio-political and historic contexts through cinema, we also care for our viewers by providing trigger warnings and encouraging inclusive and meaningful dialogue.

Each one of Cinelogue’s contributors comes from a unique background and approaches our shared politics in a singular way. The heterogeneity of Cinelogue’s collective effort allows us to put together compelling cinema programs and create a dynamic dialogue between films, contributors, and viewers.

profits

All additional profits that exceed the costs of running Cinelogue, along with appropriately compensating all collaborators and expanding access to streaming, will be reinvested in anti-colonial cinema movements by funding film projects that align with Cinelogue’s vision.