ACAB KINO: The Paradigm of Borders

During our residency at Pilar, we research the widening divide between security and care: how, in a climate of rising fascism, "security" is increasingly funded and legitimised while care infrastructures (healthcare, education, social welfare) are stripped away. We want to unpack this tactic, untangling safety, security and control, and tracing it as a recurring political pattern. Each screening, we dive into a subtopic. 



For this second screening, we turn to borders: how movement across them is policed, funded and legitimised, and how these same borders were drawn through centuries of colonisation.

Dini Adanurani's It was found floating in the sea. But perhaps it has been there for a very very long time (2026) traces the entangled history between the Netherlands and Indonesia under VOC rule, when ships crossed the sea in both directions for radically different reasons. Ibro Hasanović's Note on Multitude (2015) follows a crowd in Pristina saying goodbye as they board buses toward an uncertain future, heading to Western Europe. Gilles Vandaele & Martijn De Meuleneire's From Afar (2024) turns the camera on Belgium's own border violence, observing the landscapes around its six deportation centres alongside testimonies of people being detained. Together, the films ask: who gets to cross, who gets stopped, and whose safety is defended when borders are enforced.

After the screening, we will have a talk with Albina Fetahaj, a researcher and writer who studies borders and migration from a decolonial perspective, with a particular focus on anti-colonial resistance. She pushes us to think the unthinkable: a world without borders. Her plea goes further than simply imagining borders away. It is an invitation to reimagine the world order itself, and to search together for a more just future, for everyone. Her debut book, Grenskolonialisme, was published by EPO Uitgeverij in 2024.