Barking Community Cinema presents Afterimage, Afterlife; a selection of Mexican experimental short films that reflect on the form of absence in the face of violent histories. Moving between fragments and spectres, the works in this programme explore our camera-mediated understanding of turbulent times, turning to images as sites of both testimony and artifice. Reassembled archives, scratched surfaces and unsettling collisions summon lingering ghosts, whose traces resist systemic erasure and undermine official narratives. Gestures commemorating loss become acts of protest, inviting a tactile encounter with histories whose meanings have been obscured by conflict.

In the historic port city of Cartagena, Spain—border crossing between Global North and Global South, between the south of Europe and the north of Africa—we present a program of experimental cinema from the “other continent,” with weight placed less on North America (with which we nevertheless chronologically begin) than Latin America.