PANTHERAS
(in development)
Production: Primeira Idade, JB Multimedia Studio, X
Development support: Instituto do Cinema e Audiovisual (ICA), FICUNAM International FIlm Festival - CATAPULTA Award
Additional support: MacDowell Colony, Camargo
Foundation, Bogliasco Foundation, Film
Study Center-Harvard University, Garantir Cultura
Support: Instituto do Cinema e Audiovisual (ICA)
Pantheras is a project with an interest for human rights in the Niger Delta that replies to the urgency to address the climate crises and the need for global geopolitical reorganization.
It aims at addressing smuggling ideologies in Nigeria and clandestine economies, neoliberal risks in neocolonialism; governmentality, oil and power in the Niger Delta such (oil complex effect); economy of violence and governable spaces (spaces of chieftainship, indigeneity and nationalism).
Capitalocene. From above, the abstract monumentality of the Niger Delta (Nigeria), redefined by human ambition and reproduced into environmental catastrophe.
Existential fable. Another no-man's-land, where the blackness or the psychopathology of (Frantz) Fanon's colonization (and other African philosophers) seems now like an empty sound, and scholar debates, that writhe around neocolonialism, echo distant and misfit.
In the war for oil, we find the resentment of a region forgotten and cursed by its resources (the pride of Nigeria’s economy), trapped between a government whose priority is the development of the North and not of the South of Nigeria, and local liberation movements (illegal bunkering) that long sold its ideals to petrodollars. – Phenomenon rooted in decades and generations, condemned to perpetuate itself, that calls for international conflict intervention but which the world prefers to ignore.
The expectations are high for the new 2023 elections. The force of non-violence. Acknowledging social and ecological interdependence in an apocalyptic crisis. With the end of the fossil fuel age in the horizon the civil society leaders call for economic, social, and political change.
