Memory – What is it useful to us?

Have we learned from the past? Is it possible to deny the past? Which are the risks of forgetting the past or parts of it? – This year, the films presented on the MICAR anti-racist film festival deal with these and other questions of individual and collective memory – again with the support of transform! europe.

History, and what we are told about History, is also a product of what we hear at home, in school, in books, in the media, and also in public spaces, and in the names
of the streets, the statues and monuments.

What History have we built from our Individual and Collective Memories?
Memory is a central element in the construction of Identity. However, Memory and its own construction are subject to inevitable biases: what we remember and how we remember are reconstruction products and not faithful remembrances. We also know that the stories we tell shape the stories we chose to build for the future and the role we want to play in it.
This means that in order to defend our Identity, both individually and collectively, we are highly vulnerable to distorting our role in History, our origins, what connects us, what separates us, as well as our responsibilities and mistakes we may have committed…

Find further information at the website of the MICAR festival.

Find the programme for download on the right (PDF) (Portuguese).