Film Undone convenes artists, filmmakers, curators, researchers, and archivists to present unmade and unfinished film projects, film ideas realised in non-filmic media, as well as films that remained unseen in their intended form and at their intended time.

In this performance-lecture, researcher and curator Léa Morin brings together an assemblage of absent images and marginalised cinematic narratives – the non-existent film Basta by Moroccan left-wing leader Mehdi Ben Barka, the Algerian Cinémathèque, Łódź Film School (or the ‘star sowers’ of Moroccan cinema), the missing films of Madeleine Beauséjour from Reunion Island, and manifestos for a post-independence decolonial cinema. From these interwoven fragments, Morin forms a narrative from which multiple questions emerge: How can we archive films that do not exist? What place can we find in our histories of cinema for breaths, desires, and wounds? How might we care for these damaged or absent works without erasing them or denying the struggles in which they were forged?

Through sharing movements and materials—including films, images, documents, and photographs—this is an attempt to trace historical contours and rethink our practices; to move toward the collective and link, associate, compose, and articulate, rather than divide.

Followed by a conversation with Philip Widmann and a presentation of the book Film Undone - Elements of a Latent Cinema (Archive Books 2024).