Alessandra Ferrini

Selected for AFI'26 by Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo.

We selected Alessandra Ferrini’s film 'Sight Unseen' because it addresses what we consider one of the most urgent questions in contemporary visual culture: the relationship between images, memory, and power. Through the figure of Omar al-Mukhtar, the leader of the anti-colonial resistance against the Italian occupation of Libya and a symbol of Libyan resilience, Ferrini brings to light the processes of concealment, appropriation, and erasure that have shaped the construction of Italy’s colonial memory.

At the centre of the film is the most complete photographic record of al-Mukhtar’s capture and execution in 1931. Although these images exist and are known to scholars, their publication remains legally restricted. Ferrini addresses this absence by interrogating the conditions that produce it, revealing how power operates not only through the production of images, but also through the regulation of their circulation, accessibility, and legibility.

'Sight Unseen' speaks directly to the theme of AFI 2026, A Kind of Power. The film invites us to reflect on who has the right to see, who can be represented, and under what conditions. More importantly, it asks what role photography can play within a culture of memory shaped by colonial legacies that, in Italy, have not been forgotten so much as left unnamed—histories for which we often lack either the language or the willingness to acknowledge their continued presence. 

What happens when an image is produced as an instrument of domination and propaganda? Is it possible to reactivate it critically without reproducing its violence? How do we engage with colonial images that continue to carry unsettling narratives and asymmetrical power relations?

Through strategies of partial revelation, omission, and narration, Ferrini turns these questions into the true subject of the film. Viewers are invited to interrogate the very mechanisms that have determined what can be seen and what must remain unseen.Looking thus becomes an exercise in critical responsibility. It is precisely this dimension that makes the film particularly meaningful for us, as curators at GAMeC. One of the central premises of Pedagogy of Hope, the museum’s 2026 programme inspired by the thought of Paulo Freire, is that education should provide the tools to read the world critically and to recognise the power structures that shape its representations. 'Sight Unseen' embodies this perspective by creating the conditions through which viewers can critically examine the mechanisms by which history is narrated, obscured, and forgotten.