SAQMI at Namibia Queer Film Festival 2025

Join us at this year’s Namibian Queer Film Festival 2025, a two day celebration of queer cinema, storytelling, and community!

Two films from SAQMI archive will be screened at this new queer film festival in Namibia. SAQMIs friend and collaborator Max Fuchs is part of this amazing work and curated two films for this years festival.

Toxic by ESE and We Are the Archive by the artist group Duizend Kleuren. More about the films below.

This years theme is: Beyond Visibility: Stories That Move Us.
Free community screenings • 3–4 Dec 2025 Celebrating queer voices. More about the festival here.

A great line up of Namibian and International Queer stories. Featured Films: Toxic • Unconfined • Uno and Hatago • A Time To Shine • We Are The Archive • Unheard Voices.

This festival is proudly made possible by our partners: Namibian Arts Association, Women’s Leadership Centre Drag Night Namibia and our International Partner SAQMI – The Swedish Archives for Queer Moving Images

Come celebrate visibility, creativity, and our vibrant queer archive. See you there!

Toxic by ESE (2020, 17 min)

Why is it that we stay in destructive relationships? Through Arnold and Tiwa’s stories, Ese creates an intimate docufiction narrative exploring the different types of intimate partner violence that exists in LGBTQIA+ relationships. Inspired by true events.

ESE is a non-binary Nigerian-Swedish filmmaker. Right now based in Berlin and Gothenburg. Ese (they/them) works with text and video installations. Their work engages with topics that are LGBTQIA+related, with violence perpetrated by non-cis-men and with mental health issues. Ese studied at Katrineberg Folkhögskola in Halland and has a BFA degree in Film Composition at HDK-VALAND.studied at Katrineberg Folkhögskola in Halland and has a BFA degree in Film Composition at HDK-VALAND.

We Are The Archive / Wij Zijn Het Archief
(2024, 31:33 min)

The documentary We Are the Archive takes us into the hidden past of the Black queer community in the Netherlands. What connects us to the generations before us, and what can we learn from each other? In this film, young queer people of color, meet the women of Stichting Mil Colores, who have been organising events for women of different ethnic backgrounds and sexualities since 2000. A story about identity, resilience and a history still in motion. 

The Duizend Kleuren project poses the question: on whose shoulders do we, as the queer community, stand? With this project, we aim to show how essential it is to find each other in times of polarization. It is not just about learning from each other’s differences but also about drawing strength from what connects us. By organizing events where the documentary serves as a tool to spark conversations, we seek to strengthen and deepen these connections.

The film is Dutch spoken with English subtitles.

Duizend Kleuren
The group behind this project consists of; Joy Brandsma (she/her), a Rwandese-Dutch queer artist with a masters in Visual Anthropology; Elsa Groener (she/her), a Swedish-Dutch lesbian filmmaker and analogue photographer with a masters in Visual Anthropology; Margot van der Sande (they/she), a queer, Dutch person with a masters in Public History; Max Jonker (they/them), a Dutch, non-binary theatermaker and teacher.

Elsa Groener (she/her) is a dutch/swedish visual anthropologist, filmmaker, and photographer based in Gothenburg. Her curiosity for human mannerisms, feelings, gazes, and speech drives her exploration of how we tell our stories in images and sound. On the Duizend Kleuren project, which produced the documentary We Are the Archive, she worked as a sound producer and editor. Currently she is involved in organising screenings and impact programming for the project. She is also the photographer for PEEK!, a collaboration with Status Queer’s drag characters, The Meatbaby and Sinfluencer. Elsa’s work is rooted in examining the relationship between the body and societal architectures and how this dynamic shapes our queer experiences.

Ruth Gout and Coby Franken met when they were both a part of COC Nederland, a dutch LGBTQ+ rights group founded in 1946. They’ve been together for 35 years and are now both part of the foundation Mil Colores. Ruth as vice-president and Coby as secretary.

Read about the Nightfall #10 event with Ese here.
Read about the Nightfall #18 event with We Are the Archive here.

SAQMI is supported by the City of Gothenburg.