Projecting Wanjiru Kinyanjui

With: Karina Griffith (UdK Berlin)

A workshop entitled “Projecting Wanjiru Kinyanjui” took place at Sinema Transtopia in June 2025. Its goal was to check the 35mm print of Wanjiru Kinyanjui’s DFFB graduation film, ‘Der Kampf um den heiligen Baum’ (‘The Battle of the Sacred Tree’, 1995) held in the Deutsche Kinemathek’s archive and to take a ‘projection studies’ approach to repairing the relationship between archives and Black German cinema. Comprising Kinyanjui herself along with projectionist Florian Höhensteiger and ten participants, the workshop examined the physical 35mm reels and ‘read’ them to uncover the film’s screening history.

Film professor and curator Gabriel Menotti argues that cinema studies scholars need to be more like projectionists – studying the trajectory and condition of analogue prints and fumbling in the dark to investigate the production and screening context of cinematographic works alongside their interpretation. This proposition requires an examination of the “negative spaces in the circuits” of these films.

This case study demonstrates a model for intersectional custodial film work and indexes the risks of excluding filmmakers from the process of archiving, distributing and contextualizing their films made in Germany.

In English