Sister Cities on Screen: Memorializing against repression

How does a community keep the memory of racial violence? All members of the community are always forced to process it, whether experiencing or witnessing daily discrimination experiences, integration policies for diaspora, to mass-scale violent events.

In 1998, in the final days leading to the fall of Indonesia’s military regime, racial violence broke out in Indonesia’s big cities. Ten years after, a group of filmmakers revealed their response to the violent events through short films. Our meeting will start by watching three short films from this anthology:

We will open up space for our collective reflections, on how we remember and memorialize these tragedies, 28 years on, while also opening the possibilities to learn from other historical events connected with themes of collective trauma, discrimination, migration histories, remembrance, and how communities move forward. Relatable examples of historical events in the context of Germany are the recent racially-motivated killings in Hanau in 2020 and the 1992 incident in Rostock.

The discussion after the screening will be facilitated by writer-psychologist Nelden Djakababa Gericke.

Language of the event is English, with whispered translation to/from German and Bahasa Indonesia as needed.

The event is a collaboration between Jerman Bergerak by PMIJ (Perhimpunan Masyarakat Indonesia di Jerman) and the Sister Cities in Action project, funded by the State Office for Development Cooperation (LEZ) Berlin.