FOCUS: FRAGMENTS OF RESISTANCE

History is not neutral. It is written from positions of power, by states, by ruling classes, by systems that seek to erase the voices of the oppressed. From these seats of authority, histories of struggle are suppressed, memories of resistance deliberately obscured. But across the world today, new histories are being written – histories of resistance. Through acts of defiance, history is being reclaimed. From Palestine to Iran, from India to France, people confront the state’s violence – its bombs, its prisons, its censorship, its surveillance. Fragments of resistance emerge across geographies, asserting themselves against domination, occupation, and silence . This section gathers cinematic works that uncover and assemble these fragments: letters, recordings, a destroyed archive, gestures. Together, they form a counter-archive, a dispersed, collective refusal to forget. At Filmfest Aachen 2025, our focus is resistance. These films remind us that to remember is to resist. In Sans Soleil, Chris Marker writes: “We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?” Memory is never passive. It is shaped, distorted, and contested. Under authoritarian rule, what can be seen, said, and remembered becomes tightly controlled. In such times, memory itself becomes insurgent. It is not just a looking back, it is a political act, a refusal to forget, a mode of resistance against the present’s erasures. Gramsci argued that culture is a site of struggle: that dominant ideologies are not accepted passively, but must be constantly reinforced through what he called “hegemony.” Against this, he proposed the idea of counter-hegemony – a cultural and intellectual resistance that challenges dominant narratives and asserts alternative ways of knowing, seeing, and remembering. These films participate in that counter-hegemonic struggle. They are not spectacles of suffering. They do not aestheticize trauma. Instead, they reclaim the camera as a tool of memory and defiance. They are not memorials. They are fronts, built from the ruins of archives, from suppressed images, from voices that return, broken and unafraid. They form a counter archive against the states’ machinery. To call them fragments of resistance is to acknowledge that resistance is rarely whole. It is pieced together after the bombing, after the exile, after the silence. But these fragments endure. They confront. They remember what we are told to forget. This is not a retrospective. It is a front. A front against forgetting. A front against fascism. A front formed in the struggle over memory itself.