Curated by Abirami Logendran
Admission:
General $10
Student $7
November 20, 2025, 7pm
Brooklyn NY 11205
USA
The African Film Institute is pleased to invite you to e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, November 20, 2025 at 7pm for an evening with the film program “Counter-Rhythmic Pulses,” followed by a conversation between artist Christian Nyampeta and curator Abirami Logendran.
“Counter-Rhythmic Pulses” brings together three films that critically engage with found footage from various historical archives. Specialised Technique by Onyeka Igwe, Loving in Between by Jyoti Mistry, and Sometimes It Was Beautiful by Christian Nyampeta all confront the colonial gaze through distinct aesthetic strategies: repetition, reanimation, spoken word, and collective critique. By intervening in and reframing the source materials, the films resist the frameworks that produced them, opening space for livingness, erotic liberation, and contested histories.
These works, speaking from a position of diaspora, reflect on the movement of people and culture through time and space, showing this movement through dance and rhythms. Stuart Hall reminded us that despite its fragmentations and displacements, the self still relates to a real set of histories. “Counter-Rhythmic Pulses” grapples with such histories and their very real violence.
Program
Onyeka Igwe, Specialised Technique (2018, 7 minutes)
William Sellers and the Colonial Film Unit developed a framework for colonial cinema, this included slow edits, no camera tricks, and minimal camera movement. Hundreds of films were created in accordance with this rule set. In an effort to recuperate Black dance from this colonial project, Specialised Technique attempts to transform this material from studied spectacle to livingness.
Jyoti Mistry, Loving in Between (2013, 18 minutes)
Between birth and death is the power to love and live. Political rules, religious orders, social norms, and cultural taboos control who we love and how we love. But the erotic has the power to emancipate. With spoken word and archive sources, love is unboxed from categories in queer expression and a celebration of eros as the power to change our attitudes to life and to allow others to live their lives without judgment or prejudice.
Christian Nyampeta, Sometimes It Was Beautiful (2018, 37 minutes)
Inspired by Senegalese writer and film director Ousmane Sembène’s idea of cinema as a communal learning environment, Nyampeta placed his 2018 film, Sometimes It Was Beautiful, at the center of his project. The film, which was projected on a large screen suspended in the darkened rotunda, features a group of unlikely friends who gather to watch and critique films made by Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist in the Congo between 1948 and 1952. Their discussion highlights enduring tensions surrounding social transformation, cultural property, and who has the right to representation.
Additional support for this event was provided by the Royal Norwegian Consulate General in New York and Office for Contemporary Art Norway. A version of the program was first screened in Oslo at Kunstnernes Hus Cinema, in collaboration with Astrup Fearnley Museet.
For inquiries addressed to the African Film Institute, please write to africanfilminstitute@e-flux.com.
For general and press inquiries, contact program@e-flux.com.
Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.
