A City With Two Towers: Cinematic Memories from the Global South

Digital Film, 82 minutes

This practice-based research project introduces an original methodological approach
to decolonizing cinema by investigating how Global South filmmakers, as children, creatively reinterpreted Hollywood narratives within their local contexts. The research demonstrates distinctive originality through its innovative fusion of found-footage techniques with polyphonic first-person testimony, crafting an innovative audiovisual grammar that challenges dominant cinematic discourse. The rigour of its methodology combines ethnographic interviews with filmmakers across diverse Global South contexts, encompassing experiences of civil wars, censorship, economic crises, and political transitions, with curated Hollywood film clips. This approach reveals how material conditions of film consumption fundamentally alter meaning-making processes, generating new interpretive frameworks that resist (neo)colonial narratives, usually related to America’s “soft power” crystallised in the Hollywood studio system.  

The research establishes significant theoretical contributions to decolonial film studies by demonstrating that reception itself could constitute a form of creative resistance. Through analysis of childhood memories and their material contexts, the project reveals how Global South audiences have always actively decolonized dominant visual culture through imagination and reinterpretation. This challenges binary assumptions about active/passive spectatorship and centres Global South agency in cinematic discourse. 

The film's experimental structure, juxtaposing interviews, found footage, and reimagined
sequences, visualises its theoretical insights while developing artistic research methodologies. The project inscribes itself within found-footage, audiovisual essay, and collage traditions while extending these practices toward decolonial ends. The research findings will be shared through strategic dissemination beginning with international film festival premiere, followed by targeted screenings in community-based film collectives and academic communities. This approach ensures knowledge exchange between practitioners and scholars, maximizing potential impact on both artistic practice and theoretical discourse. The project's polyphonic methodology and collaborative framework position it to influence future approaches to decolonial cinema research, offering a replicable model for centering Global South voices in film studies.