MOONS OF CAVIA | politics, poetry & anticolonialism
Line up: Outdoor film festival (day 3)

During the first weekend of September, we will be hosting the seventh edition of our outdoor film festival, featuring not only Oscar-nominated features and local eye-opening shorts, but also music, food and performance, making for a truly special experience.  Once again, we will try to spotlight some of the diversity that makes up Cavia’s many identities, celebrating a year of incredible moments for our small cinema. 

→ Van Hallstraat 52, Amsterdam + follow the signs!

Click HERE for the full programme.

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politics, poetry & anticolonialism 

For the Saturday night of Moons, we are presenting three short films that help us reflect on colonial violence through spoken and visual poetry.

The night will open and close with a performance by Dominic Pradana, a queer Amsterdam-based Indonesian writer whose work tackles questions of identity, belonging and displacement. We then move to Guinea-Bissau, where Eduardo Williams’s experimental film Parsi takes us along the lives of the queer community, accompanied by a poem by Mariano Blatt, No Es. Then, we slide over to Beirut, Lebanon, with Jocelyne Saab’s monumental documentary Beirut, My City, in which Lebanese actor, playwright and director Roger Assaf delivers a love letter to the city he is witnessing being torn apart and destroyed. Finally, in happiness, Firat Yücel takes us through the visual landscape of the internet to ruminate on the effects of consuming violence online.

Come early to have a drink in the garden and eat with us, as we will be serving food at donation prices from the famous Amsterdam West community kitchen De Sering. Throughout the night, donations can be made to the Lebanese Red Cross. 
 

Parsi

Eduardo Williams | 2018 | Guinea-Bissau, Argentina, Switzerland | 23’ | EN subtitles 

Using a 360-degree camera, Parsi submerges the viewer in the daily lives of the queer community in Guinea-Bissau. Guided by Mariano Blatt’s poem No Es, the film is an ethnographic exercise in immersion, blurring spectator and subject.

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Beirut, My City (Beyrouth, Ma Ville)

Jocelyne Saab | 1982 | Lebanon, France | 38’ | French, EN subtitles 

Filmed during the 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut, Beirut, My City speaks to the hardships, woes and strength of the Lebanese people. The film reflects on questions of identity, belonging and memory within cycles of repeated violence. While the film was made in 1982, its themes and images resonate with the current violence in Beirut and Lebanon more broadly, an expansion of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

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happiness

Firat Yücel | 2025 | Netherlands, Turkey | 18’ | English 

These days, everything can be consumed online, including violence. How can we keep up with everything we read about or witness on the internet? happiness questions how we engage with news, violence and genocide online, how it affects us in our lived realities, and how violences underpins minute aspects of our daily lives. The desktop documentary travels the worldwide web to explore these questions.
 

Dominic Pradana

Dominic Pradana is an Indonesian writer and poet based in Amsterdam. His work explores the emotional architectures of colonialism, capitalism, nationhood, and development, asking how these inherited systems shape desire, identity, and belonging. Across his work, queerness becomes a practice of refusal - an interrogation of the inherited scripts through which we come to understand ourselves and the worlds we inhabit. Through poetry and prose, he writes as a practice of unraveling, using language as a mirror, an archive, and a site of becoming.
Dominic runs 'Surviving Paradise' on Substack, an ongoing exploration of what it means to inherit a nation, survive its promises, and imagine other ways of being. He is currently working on his debut novel of the same name.
 

Ihab Khelfa

Cairo-born, Amsterdam-based sound artist and DJ, Ihab’s practice is rooted in movement, research, and sonic storytelling. His journey began across Southeast Asia, continued through Southern Europe, and now evolves in Amsterdam, where he expands his approach to performance and musical exploration. He is currently developing an ongoing series titled La Tabla La Musique, a body of work that reflects his deep engagement with Arab pop, Raï, and electro-Shaabi. Drawing from these influences, Ihab explores ways to reconnect with his childhood sonic memory while merging it with global south electronic music, blurring the boundaries between tradition and contemporary, acid-laced textures.

Listen here to his Soundcloud!
 

De Sering

Throughout the evening, food will be provided by De Sering, the famous community kitchen founded in Amsterdam West. 
De Sering was founded on the belief that strong communities are essential for activism and progress, and that an affordable meal is the perfect way to bring people together, allowing for the material conditions that allow people to participate in society, politics, and activism. Their aim is to expand and build a network of sociocratically organised locations led by participants, fostering community and addressing loneliness and hunger. Beyond cooking and serving food, they plan to offer services like childcare and educational courses to make activism and politics more accessible.


Full programme:

18:00 | Doors open

18:30 | Dinner with food by De Sering

20:45 | Performance #1 by Dominic Pradana

21:00 | Parsi

21:30 | Beirut, My City

22:15 | happiness

22:45 | Performance #2 by Dominic Pradana

23:00 | Dj Set by Ihab Khelfa