Film Programme at Het Documentaire Paviljoen: Gendered Lives in the Aftermath of Toxicity

Visit Het Documentaire Paviljoen for a film programme followed by a public lecture with visual artists, researchers and human rights activists. This event is presented in collaboration with Sonic Acts as part of the exhibition Between Fires: Irradiated Imaginations and Anti-Nuclear Solidarities.

The programme addresses the intergenerational impact and slow violence of nuclear colonialism from a gender-focused perspective, examining how radioactive legacies continue to shape bodies, landscapes and social worlds.

The evening opens with JARA – Radioactive Patriarchy (2025, 32 min) by Aigerim Seitenova, an independent documentary examining the long-term consequences of forty years of Soviet nuclear testing on Kazakh land. Jara means ‘wound’ in Kazakh, framing radiation as a force that spreads across humans, animals, water, air and soil across generations. Drawing on Seitenova’s position as a third-generation survivor and six testimonies from women in nuclear-affected regions, the film exposes state-sponsored, technology-driven gendered violence while foregrounding women’s leadership and community knowledge. The artist is present at the screening.

Aldona (2012, 13 min) by Emilija Škarnulytė traces the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster through the life of a woman who lost her sight in 1986 after the nerves in her eyes were poisoned. The film follows Aldona on a daily walk through Grūtas Park in Lithuania, where personal memory, political history and nuclear catastrophe quietly intersect.

Nuclear Dreams (2025) by Aziza Kadyri is a poetic exploration of an unrealised dream shaped by nuclear modernity and migration. The film reflects on the artist’s father, whose aspiration to become a nuclear physicist was disrupted by the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent forced migration, weaving together inherited loss, fractured belonging and the intimate afterlives of geopolitical violence.

The evening concludes with Sahara: Counter-Poetics of Encirclement, a performative lecture by Maïa Tellit Hawad. Drawing on Tuareg experiences and the imaginaries of a wounded desert stretching across the central Sahara, the lecture layers narration, poetry and testimony to rethink how futures are imagined and reclaimed from territories marked by radioactivity, dispossession and long-term ecological damage.

Buy your ticket for the programme via the Sonic Acts Website.

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Framer Framed is supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science; Amsterdam Fund for the Arts; Municipality of Amsterdam; and VriendenLoterij Fonds.