Leiden Shorts Film Festival

Visit Wereldmuseum Leiden during Leiden Shorts

We Need to Talk About... Redrawing the Lines. Mapping Worlds, Resisting Erasure (film programme)

Maps are not just representations of space—they define who belongs, what is remembered, and how power is exercised. Whether drawn by colonial rulers, authoritarian states, or digital algorithms, maps shape the way we see and navigate the world.

This programme examines mapping not just as a means of control but also as a tool for resistance, memory, and reimagining lost spaces. Through surveillance networks, erased neighbourhoods, and spectral geographies, these films navigate landscapes marked by displacement, technological dominance, and political violence. They ask, who gets to draw the lines? What histories are overwritten? And how can mapping become an act of reclaiming and resisting? This programme is part of Leiden Shorts.

Films

Citizen-Inmate - Hesam Eslami (Iran, 2025, 15')

In Tehran, electronic monitoring has transformed the city into a digital panopticon, where movement is mapped and controlled. But when the gaze is turned back on the surveillants, the lines between watcher and watched begin to blur.

Al Basateen - Antoine Chapon (Frankrijk, 2025, 25')

In 2015, the Basateen al-Razi district of Damascus was razed to the ground as punishment for the population's uprising against Bashar al-Assad's regime. This area is set to be replaced by Marota City, a modern and connected district featuring 80 skyscrapers. Ten years on, two former residents talk about their neighborhood, where their homes and the oldest orchards in Damascus once stood. Having lost everything, two former residents recall their neighborhood, where their homes and the city's oldest orchards once stood. Through their testimonies and the repurposing of regime-produced 3D animations, memory is awakened and resists this deliberate erasure.

Tellurian Drama Tellurian Drama - Riar Rizaldi (Indonesië, 2020, 26')

The ghostly echoes of Radio Malabar, a colonial-era transmission station, map the connections between technology, colonialism, and indigenous histories. Between past and present, the film traces the unseen forces—natural, political, and spectral—that shape our understanding of place.

Together, these films redraw the lines of the maps imposed on us, offering alternative cartographies of memory, power, and belonging.

Practical info

Date: 1 June 2025
Time: 1.30 PM - 4 PM
Price: €5,-*

* This ticket gives access to the programme of Leiden Shorts Film Festival. Would you also like to visit the museum? Then get a valid ticket at the ticket desk, or order your ticket online with a €2 discount.

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