Some anthropologists who have advocated for the study of the future blame the discipline’s historical preoccupation with the study of the past and of tradition for this tendency. Others argue that the study of the future might bring us too close to prediction, prescription and the sorts of utopian thinking that the discipline has often opposed. The crises associated with the first decades of the twenty-first century led anthropologists to reconsider studying the future, for it is now clear that its imagination shapes social life and, with it, anthropological knowledge. The project is shaped by this idea, and by the corollary notion that the global south’s current dystopic political and social conditions increasingly shape—and therefore predict—the future norms of the global north. These models are also aligned with scholars’ calls to look past the preoccupations of a (white) global north and towards decolonised futures: these thinkers implore anthropologists of the global north to follow artists, scholars, and activists of the global south as they think through what the future might be.

The ANTHROFUTURE Film Festival explores the potential of filmmaking as a research method to investigate experiences of time and temporality, especially people’s orientations towards the future and their practices of future-making in the present. How can people’s relation with time and the future be investigated?

How can they be represented in cinematographic form? The festival showcases attempts to carve out new lives in virtual and material worlds, addressing hopes and dreams as well as protests, violence, and attempts to reconstruct memories. It includes films made by anthropologists, artists, and documentary filmmakers.

Curatorial Team
Sanderien Verstappen, Marie-Christine Hartig and Manuela Ciotti