Image Restitution (Laura Horelli, Hildegard Titus, Mwalengwa Hillebrecht) 2026
“Namibia – the Forgotten Colony”, 1976, GDR, was shot clandestinely in Namibia during the country’s occupation by the apartheid regime of South Africa. The film was produced in solidarity with Namibia’s most popular liberation movement at the time, SWAPO. It is one of the earliest anti-apartheid solidarity films set in Namibia.
IMAGE RESTITUTION engages with the 50-year-old film through the voices, perspectives, and artistic interventions of present-day Namibians. The filmmaking process fostered meaningful intergenerational dialogue around trauma, memory, archival politics and Namibian-German relations in postcolonial Namibia.
The initiators are three women with a deep interest in understanding, learning and restituting Namibia’s film history. Laura Horelli b. 1976: a white Finnish woman living in Berlin; Hildegard Titus b. 1991: a Black Namibian woman now living in London; Mwalengwa Hillebrecht b. 1994: a mixed heritage Namibian woman living in Windhoek.