This screening is part of the Keep an Eye Filmacademie Festival Artistic Research Week 2026, featuring graduation films by Master of Film students from the Amsterdam Filmacademie.

In this screening, you will see Girlhood Studies by Kamila Rustambekova and Kujour by Idris Elhassan both followed by a Q&A.

Girlhood Studies by Kamila Rustambekova

Girlhood Studies is an experimental film about children's unintentional learning and reproduction: two girls in their 20s perform as teenage girls, watch erotic TV shows and perform learned gender roles and their activity in the form of play – physical and virtual.

The film situates the domestic environment as the primary stage where, through play, repetition and mimesis, the child experimentally and transgressively performs gender, power, and sexual interaction. Drawing on my own experience of growing up in Uzbekistan in the 2000s, I research how young girls generally reinterpret adult behaviours through play, and how those games reflect their understanding of sexuality, romantic relationships, and social roles.

In this work, sex becomes a central point of tension: something not fully understood or experienced firsthand, but encountered as a mysterious and mediated idea, constructed through television, popular media, and the observed behavior of adults. I trace the tension and shifting boundaries between “innocence” and experience, between knowledge and unawareness, between a child and an adult.

Kujour by Idris Elhassan

Operating amid the asymmetry between a personal archive destroyed in war and a meticulously preserved colonial archive, a tension arises over what it means to work with a colonial archive that erases and rewrites history, then claims to protect what it destroyed. Kujour, an ancient spiritual presence, is evoked to speak against this erasure. It presents a historical account that challenges the archives and uncovers gestures of resistance within them.

From the excavation of Jebel Moya by Henry Wellcome between 1911 and 1914, to an encounter of the daughter of a colonial administrator, returning Sultan Ali Dinar's rifle to the Sudanese Ambassador in London in 1985, to a genocide now, this project traces colonial violence as continuity.

The maker, contending with their position and inherited legacy, working from within the colonial core, they ask what forms of knowledge and what practices of memory existed before colonialism demanded the archive as the only legitimate way to remember? What was lost when preservation became another instrument of control?