concept

Cinelogue provides a collaborative space for film curation, streaming, and critical dialogue around cinema, representation, and politics by presenting cinema exclusively by the Global Majority.

Cinelogue represents, revives, and celebrates critically acclaimed and emerging filmmakers from countries and communities within Africa, Asia, South America, and Oceania. Our platform shares the work of filmmakers who have left a groundbreaking mark on the arthouse world. 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 our curated programs, Cinelogue collaborates with film programmers, curators, film collectives, filmmakers, and scholars who are representative of the contexts to which the films speak. While carefully curating a selected number of films under a chosen theme, this collective and collaborative effort creates a unique dialogue through and between the showcased films.

We are also in the process of building a collaborative library of arthouse classics and contemporary films, with the goal to evolve our model into a subscription platform.

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 from the past and engage with them as commentaries on the present day.

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.

Cinelogue considers the act of searching, excavating, and re-screening postcolonial cinema as a political act in itself. It is a form of resistance against forgetting and erasure and a way to revisit historic cinematic works and place them in contemporary discourses.

Our team is dedicated to continuing the restoration 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 arthouse 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.

The shared commitment of speaking and raising awareness about themes of race, gender, and class through film is also showcased through the care for our viewers, providing trigger warnings and encouraging 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.