Portals is an experiment in curating, distributing and, above all, exhibiting international arthouse, non-english language, and independent world cinema for African audiences. Following a lineage of cinema as witness and imagination through resistance, we welcome you to our first edition in Joburg, a port without a sea. People arrive here carrying everything they have.
We invite you to gather with us, as a way of crossing borders, encountering other lives, and thinking about power across past, present, and future through film. This edition turns to the African continent and broader global majority with stories on migration, labour, the art of survival. It builds on the legacy of the Tricontinental Film Festival and launches at The Bioscope, one of the last independent cinema spaces in the city. Rooted in anti-imperialist principles, we believe institutions are best built collaboratively, from the bottom up, people to people.
In a moment of growing influence from far-right politics and consequent polarisation, we are asking how to build community across our differences without flattening them, and how Johannesburg, a hybrid city that defies borders and definitions, can be a home for the beginning of this critical conversation.
Booking: Purchase a “R20 Cafe Voucher” to reserve your seat for these screenings. This will get you R20 off your Bioscope Cafe bill on this day.
PROGRAMME
SAT 21 Nov 6pm: As Shams – A Journey to the Sun BOOK NOW. Sonic Lecture by DJ, archivist, and arts journalist Atiyyah Khan
SAT 21 Nov 7:30: The Pearl Button BOOK NOW. Patient, poetic and political, carrying the long memory of colonial violence across a border that is also an ocean. Following a sonic lecture on the hidden archives of Johannesburg’s music, it asks what we hear when we listen to the past, and whom we owe that listening to.
SUN 22 Nov 2pm: Portals x Girls in Film Shorts Programme BOOK NOW.
SUN 22 Nov 4pm: L’histoire de Souleyman BOOK NOW. Our closing film follows one man’s race against time through a city that depends on his labour while withholding belonging from him. It speaks to the questions at the heart of Portals: who gets to cross borders and whose stories are believed, but it also urges us to think about the cost of convenience in our economy.
