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For a genre obsessed with the future, science fiction on screen has often looked suspiciously like a colonial rerun: new planets, same old empires. Other Skies flips the script.
This program brings together short films from across the Global South that seize speculative fiction from its imperial past and transform it into a space of critical invention. Challenging the reductive framing of these regions as perpetually in crisis, the programme foregrounds works by filmmakers who dismantle colonial protocols of “progress” and reassert authorship over their own histories and futures.
Long dominated by Eurocentric cinematic traditions, science fiction has often served as a fantasy of conquest for the white man. Yet, in the hands of filmmakers from the Global Majority, the genre shifts register. Drawing on currents such as Arabfuturism, the films in this programme use speculative fiction as a way of thinking through generational and environmental wounds in ways realism cannot hold. In effect, the “fiction” of science-fiction becomes a powerful means of comprehension, where fabulation helps offer new political imaginaries.
Other Skies invites audiences to witness speculative fiction in new hands—restless, incisive, and unmistakably its own.
This program is curated by Najrin Islam.
