After the dart, International Festival of Art
- Zekican Sarısoy
- Dec 25, 2025
- 8 min read
The Dart Film Festival, which we had the chance to attend in Barcelona, held its ninth edition this year. It opened up a strong space for rethinking the political, aesthetic, and narrative possibilities of documentary cinema. At the same time, the relationship between contemporary arts and cinema was at the core of the program. While Looking for Simone and Radical Women focused on the invisible intellectual and artistic legacies of women, LOOT: A Story of Crime and Redemption and Globomania critically examined concepts of colonialism, circulation, and ownership. Climate Art and Memories of Love Returned invited reflection on collective wounds such as memory, loss, and the climate crisis through different narrative forms. Alreadymade, centered on Duchamp, once again showed us that the apparent impasses in translating classic questions about the art object and the production of meaning into a contemporary context actually leave us with remarkably powerful questions. It remains important to discuss certain issues persistently and without fatigue in the context of the world’s current sociopolitical climate. The talk titled “Storytelling, Aesthetics and Innovation in Digital Culture,” featuring Gavin Humphries from the global video platform Nowness as a speaker, offered a framework for where we stand today in relation to the new connections digital narratives establish with aesthetics. The festival once again reminded us that documentary filmmaking and the ongoing search within cinematic language are not merely acts of recording, but active spaces for thinking and confrontation. In this text, you will find brief reviews of some of the films we watched at the festival.
dart, International Festival of Art, 2025
Looking for Simone (Nathalie Masduraud / Valérie Urréa, France, 2024)
I think this #documentary opens an important discussion. #SimonedeBeauvoir, as one of the powerfull figures of #feminist literature, still occupies a central place by the way. But when we look at today’s debates between second and third-wave feminism, her legacy opens a space that is both inspiring and open to scrutiny.
Through the voices it brings together around The Second Sex, the documentary maintains the discussion in a balanced dialogue between past and present. Beauvoir sought to liberate the experience of womanhood from historical, cultural, and philosophical determinations, and her emphasis on the constructed nature of the subject radically transformed the direction of feminist theory. Yet contemporary debates remind us that Beauvoir’s universalist definitions sometimes exclude certain identity and experiences.
While the deconstructive and existentialist line of the second wave positioned womanhood as a shared fate shaped by patriarchy, third-wave feminists criticize the homogenizing effect of this idea of “sharedness.” With the rise of identity politics, it is emphasized that race, class, sexuality, and cultural context sharply differentiate the experience of being a woman. In this sense, although Beauvoir’s analysis offers a strong starting point, conflicting feminisms strive to make visible the multiple identities that cannot be fully contained within her framework.
Still, Beauvoir’s significant contribution I mean the idea that the subject is not given but constructed, finds renewed resonance today in #queer theory and intersectional feminism. The discussion in the doc. and each of the questions it raises are deeply valuable. Problematizing the fixity of the category of woman, debating the performativity of gender, and focusing on the individual’s capacity to constitute their own existence build a strong bridge between Beauvoir’s thought and contemporary perspectives.
Radical Women (Isabel De Luca / Isabel Nascimento Silva, Brazil, 2023)
Directed by Isabel De Luca and Isabel Nascimento Silva. It's an exceptionally powerful #documentary that centers Latin American women artists. A truly exquisite work. Brilliant. Bringing together eleven women artists who produced their work between 1960-1985 under conditions of authoritarianism, censorship, and exile, the film draws its greatest strength from their reunion many years later.
The documentary’s feminist current is remarkably clear and sincere. Thank you so much for all your steps. These women do not simply remember; they ask each other questions, sit side by side and face to face, and attempt to think through both the past and the present together. Rather than constructing a single authoritative voice, the film creates a space of collective memory. This reciprocal exchange transforms the documentary from a nostalgic return into a living, political conversation rooted firmly in the present.
The doc. also uses archival material and testimonies not merely to document history, but to make visible once again how art functions as a form of resistance. The presence of artists such as Anna Bella Geiger, Cecilia Vicuña, and Liliana Porter gives concrete form to this history of resistance, while also demonstrating the enduring continuity of feminist artistic practice. This film reminds us that women artists are not only responding to past forms of oppression, but are also opening up ways of thinking and creating in the face of inequalities that persist today. Radical Women is a deeply valuable work that powerfully affirms art as a political pursuit, a collective memory, and a feminist stance.
LOOT: A Story of Crime and Redemption (Don Millar, Canada, 2025)
LOOT: A Story of Crime and Redemption> Director Don Millar exposes the hidden networks of the international art trade that operate through the looted cultural heritage of #Cambodia. The #documentary’s strongest aspect is showing that the system built by Douglas Latchford is far more than a “collector’s crime.” The film reveals a global art market intertwined with prestigious Western galleries and museums. Through testimonies, expert insights, and researchers tracing the origins of stolen objects, it conveys with striking clarity how this economic network was constructed.
Yet the film stops right at the threshold of the most critical question: why is cultural capital valuable, and how is that value produced? When Latchford’s actions are reduced to a personal crime story, the colonial political economy behind the issue fades from view. Structural questions, such as the power Western institutions hold to legitimize these objects, museum acquisition policies, how antiquities become “valuable,” and who is impoverished in that process and are barely addressed. As a result, looting begins to resemble an adventure or “treasure-hunting” narrative driven by individual greed, rather than a systematic practice produced by historical power relations. However, what truly enables Cambodia’s cultural artifacts to be transported to the West so easily is precisely this colonial legacy: powerful actors using legal, economic, and discursive tools to commodify culture.
“Loot” succeeds in making the consequences visible, but pays less attention to the geopolitical and historical roots of looting. For that reason, while the film is compelling, it could have been far more impactful had it engaged more deeply with how cultural heritage becomes embedded in market relations, the power asymmetries shaping the global circulation of art, and the fact that cultural capital itself is a colonial construction.
Globomanía (Sissel Morell Dargis, Denmark/Spain, 2024)
Globomanía also known "Balomania", centers on a secret community of hot air balloon makers operating in the favelas of #Brazil, crafting an extraordinary cinematic experience from within a fully illegal practice. These people risk everything to launch these balloons and sometimes reaching up to 70 meters in height and powered by fireworks and forms the film’s core axis.
I really loved that the film does not treat this illegal and invisible world merely as a site of “crime.” Instead, through a guerrilla-style mode of storytelling, it frames this practice as a form of resistance, a collective dream, and an almost poetic space of escape. When the balloons rise into the night sky alongside Brazil’s ongoing socioeconomic collapse and political rupture, they generate a sense of hope that is surreal and extremely fragile, yet unmistakably real. Perhaps an illusion that is not real, but profoundly real at the same time. Rather than relying on grand slogans, Globomanía conveys a country’s deepening crisis through this underground, illegal aesthetic. In a context where the state, the law, and the public sphere have withdrawn, people’s effort to build their own sky makes the film not only moving but also politically powerful. This collective action emerging from illegality stands as one of the rare examples that recalls the guerrilla spirit of cinema and one whose formal choices will stay with me for a long time. Definetely!
Climate Art (Mathias Frick, Germany, 2025)
Climate Art: From Protest to Utopia offers a powerful framework for thinking about how art can open up political and aesthetic spaces in the face of the #climatecrisis. By tracing how artists, collectives, and forms of action have evolved from the past to the present, the film reminds us that art is not only a mode of representation but also a force capable of mobilizing action.
One of the #MathiasFrick's #documentary most compelling aspects is the doc. refusal to treat the climate crisis as an abstract disaster narrative. Instead, it approaches it as an issue deeply intertwined with economic, political, and social inequalities. Within a capitalist regime of production and consumption, it is women and other vulnerable groups who are most severely affected by the climate crisis and its an irony that is also profoundly meaningful. The film makes visible how precisely these groups are often at the forefront of artistic practice and activism. This, in turn, helps explain why art can function as a driving force in the age of climate crisis. The works presented are not merely warnings about the future; they propose practices that imagine alternative ways of living, enable collective solidarity, and keep utopian possibilities alive. By following the trajectory from protest to utopia, Climate Art: From Protest to Utopia stands as an important document that reminds us how art sustains and revitalizes political imagination. Thank you so much director Mathias. Lovely #AgnesDenes and her activist hands.
Talk: About Nowness. Storytelling, Aesthetics and Innovation in Digital Culture
As part of the festival, a conversation was held with the video content platform Nowness. However, the way platforms like Nowness, those that claim a curatorial stance, evaluate AI-generated content solely along the lines of “does it look good / does it work?” feels like a deliberate attempt to separate the aesthetic from the political. Yet such a separation is no longer possible, because #AI itself is not merely an aesthetic tool but, above all, an economic-political apparatus.
The kind of approach Gavin Humphries described in the talk, “we look at it, it looks great, we take it”, treats art almost as a perfectly smooth surface. A surface that leaves out context, conditions of production, labor, data extraction, copyright issues, and even politics of representation. This, in fact, weakens the
platform’s own aesthetic claim, because aesthetics are not only about visual quality, but also about the conditions under which something is produced or creating process.
On the other hand, as in the position we try to inhabit, making metrics such as clicks, popularity, and “performance” the primary criteria also contradicts, in a way, the “selective/curatorial” position Nowness has long sought to establish. If aesthetic decisions are aligned with algorithmic attention, then where does the platform draw its distinction? Here, aesthetic concern is gradually translated into market logic. To us, the core problem seems to be this: when these platforms choose not to talk about AI, they are not remaining neutral. On the contrary, they are silently endorsing existing power relations. Not discussing political vulnerability is not an omission, but an active choice. The issue is not whether AI is good or bad, but why it can be so easily depoliticized. And it is precisely at this point that the aesthetic promise of platforms like Nowness becomes most fragile.
This review was published as Turkish on December 25, 2025 on artfulliving.com
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