Donate now! Help Freefilmers in war-torn Ukraine

Please join the global community and donate funds to Freefilmers, a diasporic cinemovement and NGO of filmmakers, artists, and activists working in solidarity with a broader network of grassroots humanitarian initiatives in the regions most afflicted by the war in Ukraine.

Originally from Mariupol, since the all-out Russian invasion in Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Freefilmers are now forcibly dispersed across the world, engaging in struggle against Russian imperial aggression and all imperialist warfare the world over. With your donation, Freefilmers can continue making films in defiance of war and building an intersectional network of humanitarian solidarity and support for internally displaced people and vulnerable communities, including Roma people, women from rural areas, people with disabilities, and other non-normative minorities.

Let’s do this together, please donate!

This crowdfunding is an initiative of BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht (The Netherlands) in solidarity and in collaboration with Freefilmers. BAK is a base for art, theory, and social action. Committed to the notion of art as a public sphere and a political space, and provides a critical platform for aesthetic political experiments with and through art.

From 9 September–29 October 2023 BAK presents the exhibition and public program To Watch the War: The Moving Image Amidst the Invasion of Ukraine (2014–2023). This exhibition and public program is conceptualized by researcher, film programmer, and writer Olexii Kuchanskyi and filmmaker Oleksiy Radynski. The exhibition and public program at BAK is convened in dialogue with the BAK team as a reconfigured and updated iteration of a project shown in 2022 at Coalmine – Raum für Fotografie, Winterhur.

The project has been convened from within the experimental film and video making that has emerged in direct response to the Russian war on Ukraine that began with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and which continues to date as a full-scale invasion. The forum assembles 19 experimental films and videos that employ various grassroots tactics and critical approaches to counter the simplistic-sensationalist imagery pushed by social and mass media that feasts on military technologies and propagandas of the renewed imperial politics. Against the grain of such mediatic loops, the forum offers much subtler, varied, and nuanced pathways to “watch the war” altogether differently. While experimentally documenting the war from the viewpoint of living (in) it, they simultaneously resist it by foregrounding not the destruction but the resilience and agency of human and other subjects that emerge in the face of this unjustifiable, protracted emergency.

Throughout fall 2023 and beyond, BAK joins with a number of cultural and educational institutions across the city of Utrecht to continue the conversation, with and through art, on the vital need to uphold solidarity with people and other-than-humans subjected to protracted wars the globe over. With the sequel titled To Watch the War, in Solidarity, and coinciding with renovations of BAK’s premises, these impromptu expositions remobilize the works from previous BAK projects into the present, including from Concerning War (2005, 2010), Former West (2008–2016), and Propositions for Non-Fascist Living (2017–ongoing).

The project is accompanied with a crowdfunding campaign in support of Freefilmers—some of its members are artists included in the exhibition and public program To Watch the War: The Moving Image Amidst the Invasion of Ukraine (2014–2023). Freefilmers are working in solidarity with a broader network of grassroots humanitarian initiatives in the regions most afflicted by the war in Ukraine.

Please join the campaign: the time is now!

Click here for further updates concerning the campaign and more details about the humanitarian initiatives Freefilmers is supporting.

Click here for more information about BAK’s project To Watch the War: The Moving Image Amidst the Invasion of Ukraine (2014–2023).