The Sputnik room, the Factory cinema, has a particular character: in the center, rows of seats covered in velvet. On the edges, small coffee tables, large armchairs and soft sofas, the kind you imagine sitting next to a fireplace. It is in these pieces of furniture that, this Friday, the new trio who manage the place (Karin Schlageter, Nakita Lameiras Ah-kite and Maryam Esmail Zavieh) and a director from Guinea-Bissau, Sana Na N’Hada, who will speak Saturday during the first Swiss screening of his film “Nome”.
The scene seems emblematic of the project that the three women have for Sputnik, which reopened on Wednesday: “giving voice to other stories, which are not dominant, because of the theme or the form”. This is exactly what “Nome” is, a work about the guerrilla war between 1963 and 1974 between the independence fighters of the small West African country and the Portuguese colonial army, interweaving fiction and archive images. The film, praised by the French specialist press, had not found a distributor in Switzerland until Sputnik picked it up.
“Our idea is to defend this type of film. This is a risk that venues that are not subsidized by the City rarely take.” The new team therefore wishes to emphasize the struggles of minorities, “from a social, decolonial or LGBT point of view”, while “making cinema accessible”: this is how on Saturday, the African film will be “ dubbed” by a sign language interpreter. Once a month, a session will also be organized for children, with workshops and mediation. The offer will be launched in June with “Wardi”, an animated film telling the story of a Palestinian girl living in a refugee camp.
Generally speaking, the trio claims to have thought of Sputnik “as a meeting place”. There will therefore be films, committed because “cinema is an activist activity”, they judge, but also various related activities. The room includes a bar and “regular meetings around food” are planned. The other Factory entities will intervene once a month. In June, the “fanzinotheque” will, for example, offer interactive comic book readings. And as much as possible, the directors of the films shown or the associations which support them if they are archives, will be called upon to interact with the public.
This Friday, in a small group, Sana Na N’Hada spoke about the way he had experienced the war in Guinea-Bissau, the scars it had left, and the importance of cinema, image and of the document in such a context: “we must show young people where the country comes from”. And to the people of Geneva this piece of history which would not have reached them without the stubbornness of the Sputnik programmers, they could have added.
