Spotlight Windhoek, Sinema Transtopia, Berlin 19.11.2025

For the 25 Years of Twin Cities Windhoek – Berlin festival, AFRIKAMERA presented a comprehensive programme at Sinema Transtopia. Namibian director and producer Joel Haikali presented WINDHOEK SHORTS (Namibia 2019–2024) with current short and medium-length films from the Namibian capital. A work-in-progress IMAGE RESTITUTION was screened alongside SORRY FOR THE GENOCIDE (Work in Progress (2025)) by Matteo Sant’Unione and Theodora Shandé, a documentary that touches on the Ovaherero and Nama genocide.

The panel discussion and audience conversation that followed shed some light on the relative absence of white German-Namibian perspectives in IMAGE RESTITUTION, which was more a result of the reluctance on their part to come forward with their perspectives and allow their discussions to be documented . This connected to questions about the intended audience for the film, especially in light of the original documentary’s lack of accessibility to a Namibian audience prior to the IMAGE RESTITUTION project. IMAGE RESTITUTION deals with some of the darker aspects of Namibian history, balancing the difficulty of having to revisit this trauma and the importance of connecting to the past as a means of enacting future change.

The panel also considered the political divide between East ad West Germany contributed to a film like Namibia – the Forgotten Colony, which offered one of the first explicit acknowledgements of German colonial oppression and genocide in Namibia, to be made. East Germany, from its somewhat ‘outside’ perspective, was able to overtly criticize German colonialism and uplift the voices of SWAPO.