Article:
A genealogy of migrant organising by Germany’s Asiatische Deutsche: Presencing the Asian Film Festival Berlin

Author(s): Heberer, Feng-Mei

Abstract

The first film festival of its kind in Germany, the Asian Film Festival Berlin (AFFB), was run by multiple generations of Asian German organisers from 2007-2017. In 2020, the festival came to a halt due to lack of resources. The recent disruption of the AFFB leads us back to the festival’s roots in migrant labor organising by South Korean guest workers in 1970s West Germany. This harbinger labor movement sparked by migrant women inspired the creation of two important diasporic Asian grassroots collectives based in Germany, each of which would respectively host the AFFB: the Koreanische Frauengruppe and korientation. To excavate these genealogical connections is to document an interconnected history of community organising that remains overlooked in official postwar history, and that highlights the unique cyclicality of the AFFB as part of ever-evolving minoritarian movements that positively advance documentation, inclusion, and social justice.

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BibTex
Heberer, Feng-Mei: A genealogy of migrant organising by Germany’s Asiatische Deutsche: Presencing the Asian Film Festival Berlin. In: NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies, Jg. 12 (2023), Nr. 2, S. 197-219. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/21709.
@ARTICLE{Heberer2023,
 author = {Heberer, Feng-Mei},
 title = {A genealogy of migrant organising by Germany’s Asiatische Deutsche: Presencing the Asian Film Festival Berlin},
 year = 2023,
 doi = "\url{http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/21709}",
 volume = 12,
 address = {Marburg},
 journal = {NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies},
 number = 2,
 pages = {197--219},
}
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