6TH ETHNOKINO FILM FESTIVAL BERN 11/13 SEPT

6th FILM FESTIVAL LOVE AND LAND TAKES PLACE IN BERN BETWEEN 11/13 SEPTEMBER, SIMULTANOUSLY AS IT TAKES PLACE AT INDIGENOUS TERRITORIES IN PERU. FOLLOWED BY A MEIRINGEN EDITION IN SWITZERLAND DURING OCTOBER.

In an era marked by deepening social inequality and unprecedented concentrations of wealth, land remains one of the most decisive, yet often overlooked, forces shaping power, prosperity, and belonging. Nowhere is this more visible than in Latin America, the region with the world's most unequal distribution of land, where vast territories remain concentrated in the hands of a privileged few. These historical patterns of ownership continue to shape social hierarchies, political economies, and ecological futures, linking local realities to global systems of extraction and capital.

The 6th edition of the EthnoKino Film Festival is presented in partnership with YarpuyNinchik inititative bringing cinema to indigenous territories in Peru, with the Wyss Academy for Nature to co-produce impact films and Turning Land into Capital Research Project headed by the Departments of Iberian and Latin American History at the Universities of Bern and Bielefeld. This collaboration inspired an international open call inviting filmmakers to explore Love & Land as two inseparable forces shaping our relationships with territory, memory, justice, and the living world.

We welcomed cinematic works particularly from Latin America that move beyond the immediacy of current crises to situate contemporary realities within longer historical trajectories, from the expansion of export economies and the 1929 global economic crisis to the neoliberal restructuring of the late twentieth century. These transformations reshaped landscapes, ownership, livelihoods, and governance, while communities across the world continued to cultivate alternative ways of inhabiting, defending, and caring for the places they call home.

In a time marked by displacement, ecological breakdown, and fractured relationships between people and place, love becomes more than an emotion. It is an ethic of care, reciprocity, and responsibility. Through the lenses of visual and multimodal anthropology, EthnoKino sought films that illuminate diverse expressions of love: for land, for community, for ancestors, for future generations, and for the more-than-human world.

How do people remain rooted when territories are transformed or taken away? What forms of solidarity emerge through shared struggles for land, dignity, and cultural survival? How can cinema reveal ways of belonging that challenge extractive models of development and open space for more just and regenerative futures?

EthnoKino 2026 celebrates cinema as a meeting place between science and arts where storytelling becomes an act of witnessing, dialogue, and imagination, inviting audiences to rethink land not merely as territory or property, but as relationship, responsibility, and a shared horizon of possibility.

Follow the Website for more information.

https://www.ethnokino.com/love-land-2026