International
Women's Film Festival
The International Women's Film Festival Dortmund+Cologne is Germany's largest forum for women in the film industry and presents outstanding films by women of all genres and styles. For more than 40 years, the festival has been actively contributing to films by female directors being seen, appreciated and canonised more widely. The festival strengthens the influence of women in all areas of the film industry: first and foremost directors, but also cinematographers, producers, screenwriters, composers, actors and many more.
short film programme:
Decolonize the Archive
As part of our examination of the colonial past of our immediate surroundings – Fredenbaumpark – we collaborated with the International Women's Film Festival in 2025 to organise a short film programme at our neighbours, the Sweet Sixteen cinema.
Curated by Betti Schiel, a film programme entitled Resilience in Images was created, in which filmmakers explore artistic possibilities for dealing with racist archive images from the colonial era in a variety of ways.
The programme included films by Rebecca Pokua Korang, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Terri Francis and Eva Knopf.
Park tour -
Discover Dortmund's colonial history
The project Decolonize Dortmund, led by Black people and people of colour, is dedicated to reappraising Dortmund's colonial past. Historical connections and colonial continuities of the city that lie hidden are made visible through careful research. The project has developed a city tour and an audio walk, which is available online in German, English, French and Kiswahili.
As part of the IFFF Dortmund+Cologne, Fidel Amoussou-Moderan invites you to a tour of Fredenbaumpark. There he will explain the history of this place, where African people were exhibited at the end of the 19th century. These human zoos were organised by Hamburg zoo director and animal dealer Carl Hagenbeck, who put African people and other so-called ‘exotic peoples’ on display in a staged environment. The people were treated like animals and often viewed with contempt by the spectators. These shows were designed to demonstrate the supposed superiority of European culture and reinforced racist stereotypes. The tour of Fredenbaumpark not only sheds light on the history of these shows, but also encourages visitors to question the long-term effects of such colonial practices.
Fidel Amoussou-Moderan, historian, curator and doctoral candidate specialising in colonial violence, Richard Opoku-Agyemang (RAZZMATAZZ), musician and artist, and Mona Laiser, social scientist and expert on Blackness and Afrofuturism, are co-founders and active members of Decolonize Dortmund. Through their work, they make an essential contribution to creating a new awareness of the city's history. They not only address the past, but also take a look at the present and the future in order to bring about lasting change in the structures of racism and discrimination. The tour offers a valuable opportunity to get to know Dortmund from a new perspective and to engage with the city's colonial history.
