Portuguese artist Filipa César’s Spell Reel is “the result of a multifaceted research and digitization project that she initiated in 2011 with Sana na N’Hada and Flora Gomes. Having studied film in Cuba, the two began using the camera to observe the fight for independence [from Portugal] in Guinea-Bissau (1963–74). After the decaying visual and audio material was digitized in Berlin, the filmmakers travelled with a mobile cinema to the places where the footage had originally been shot and showed it to audiences for the first time, adding their own commentary. . . . Spell Reel watches an archive at work to produce the present” (Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Arsenal—Institute for Film and Video).

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