We’re thrilled to be seeing–and responding to–these powerful films with the Brydcliffe community. More relevant than ever, the films in this series confront the legacy of colonialism, exploitation, and erasure. They reveal how spirits haunt historical memory and cinematic form, demanding justice for the past while confronting its ongoing presence. —Jenelle Troxell, curator

Some films do not merely tell stories; they summon ghosts, refusing to let history’s silences remain unbroken. They remind us that the past is not dead. It haunts us still, flickering on the edges of the frame, waiting for us to see.

The Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild is pleased to collaborate with Union College Film Studies, with technical support from the Woodstock Film Festival,  in presenting a series of films that speak to colonialism, exploitation and erasure of histories. Each screening will include special guests and a discussion.  

Cinema has always been a haunted medium. It conjures presences, traces of people, places, and events that hover between memory and erasure. This spectral quality is uniquely suited to grappling with history’s ghosts, particularly those of colonial violence, atrocities, disease, (dis)possession, and environmental devastation. Bringing together the unresolved past, troubled present, and images of the future, films like The Battle of Algiers (1966), Atlantics (2019), and We Have Just Begun (2023) use this haunting potential to explore how the past refuses to stay buried. The massacred, the exploited, and the oppressed remain with us, demanding acknowledgment and justice. The films in this series are aggressive, nuanced, ideologically powerful, and formally innovative. They disinter “forgotten” memories, inhabit archives, and occupy cinematic form. Spectres of Empire doesn’t simply tell stories, it summons ghosts.

Spectres of Empire is curated by Jenelle Troxell