“Beyond Compare?”
Entwicklungsland | Revisited
The film revisits the German adaptation of the 1975 BBC educational film “Developing Country Ghana: Life in the City”, which sought to depict the daily lives of two families—one “rich”, one “poor”— in the capital city, Accra, almost two decades after independence from British rule. Some fifty years later, the protagonists—then children, now elders—watch the film for the first time and share their thoughts on the historical material. In centring their current perspectives and version of the story, a multi-layered reflection on the politics of representation, memory and postcolonial image politics emerges.
Year: 2025
Length: 27′
Format: HD, stereo
Langauge: English, German
Subtitles: English
Director/Producer: Nnenna Onuoha
With: Emmanuel Borlabi Bortey, Tamara Kwarteng, Clelia Villareal
Sound/Image/Edit: Nnenna Onuoha
Score: Jessica “Aamowi” Longdon
Commissioned by: Sinema Transtopia as part of the project, “The Past is Not Another Country–Doing Archives Differently” by Sinema Transtopia and Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum
Exhibitions
Sinema Transtopia, Berlin Art Week
Sinema Transtopia presents newly commissioned works by Cana Bilir-Meier and Nnenna Onuoha as part of the project The Past is Not Another Country: Doing Archives Differently. Each examines the power relations present in archival image material, proposing artistic ways of restaging and reshaping the narratives it transmits.
Nnenna Onuoha’s essayistic video work Living in a Developing Country—Revisited (AT) engages with the 1975 BBC educational film Developing Country Ghana: Life in the City. Through conversations with the protagonists portrayed at the time and their current perspectives on the historical film material, a multi-layered reflection on representation, memory and postcolonial image politics emerges.
Following the premiere screenings of both works on Friday 12 SEP at 6.30pm, they will be viewable as a looped video installation at Sinema Transtopia from Saturday to Sunday.
Commissioned by Sinema Transtopia ©2025.
In the framework of the project The Past is Not Another Country—a project by Sinema Transtopia and DFF—Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum.
Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds.
In The Past is Not Another Country: Doing Archives Differently, Sinema Transtopia and the the DFF join forces with artists, filmmakers, archivists and activists to ask: How do patterns of power travel through film history and film archives? How might these patterns be disrupted? How can narratives be revised and reframed to tell a different story in the future? This two-year project aims to question and update practices of collecting, presenting, and mediating film.
