About this Event
Join us at West Den Haag on October 29th & 30th, 2026 for Emancipated Spectators, a special two-day program exploring the democratic power of cinema with philosopher Jacques Rancière and acclaimed filmmaker Pedro Costa.
The program is grounded in Rancière’s contention that all people are equally intelligent and that cinema, by elevating the everyday, opens up a radically democratic field of expression and reception of art.
The event features screenings of Costa’s deeply evocative films, a special conversation between Rancière and Costa and an intensive workshop session with Rancière on his works Emancipated Spectator and Film Fables.
Jacques Rancière has a fundamental commitment in which all people are assumed at the outset to be equally intelligent, and the ethical position is to discover how intelligence functions in the other person, and to learn how to appreciate the other’s unfamiliar imagination.
Cinema, for Rancière, is a supremely democratic art form. In cinema we have a context which can transform the every day, the fall of light on a table or a face, into a supremely aesthetic experience. Validating the everyday in this way means that cinema provides an art experience not only 'available to everyone' but that everyone has it in them to be an artist, by seeing their own experience of the world raised to the level of art.
One of the film-makers who epitomise Rancière’s interest in cinema is Pedro Costa. His films are spare and quiet, letting the people and locations that appear, tell their own stories, deep stories which resonate with the living legacies of colonialism in his precarious and marginalized subjects.
In our special 2-day encounter 'Emancipated Spectators' participants will immerse in these deep reflections on contemporary reality and the prospects of humanity and its arts. Accompanying screenings of Pedro Costa’s films we will host a special conversational encounter between Jacques Rancière and Pedro Costa on whom the former has written extensively.
Program:
Thursday 29.10.2026
Attention: screening takes place at Cinema Pathé Buitenhof 20
Program: West Den Haag Auditorium, Lange Voorhout 102, Den Haag
(these two locations are 700 meters apart)
14:00 — 18:00
Location: Cinema Pathé Buitenhof (boutique seats)
Film screenings (TBC)
Pedro Costa: Ossos (Bones) 1997 - 94 min.
Pedro Costa: Vitalina Varela, 2019 - 124 min.
Pedro Costa: As Filhas do Fogo (The Daughters of Fire), 2023 - 8 min.
18:00 — 19:30
Location: West Den Haag
Dinner break with vegan soup & snacks
20:00 — 21:30
Welcome words: Marie-José Sondeijker
Encounter with Pedro Costa & Jacques Rancière
moderated by Baruch Gottlieb (in English)
21:30 — 22:30
Drinks
Friday 30.10.2026
Location: West Den Haag
10:00 — 11:30
Welcome words: Baruch Gottlieb
Jacques Rancière workshop: Emancipated Spectator and Film Fables
Jacques Rancière is renown not only for how he retrieves forgotten histories in archives and museums, his philosophical writing is unique in how he weaves personal commentary, speculation and open questioning into the historical subjects of his interest. This special session is a rare opportunity to discuss with the author, the themes and thinking in his books Emancipated Spectator and Film Fables.
11:30 — 12:00
Coffee break
12:00 — 13:00
Jacques Rancière workshop: Emancipated Spectator and Film Fables (continues)
13:00 hrs.
The end
Event venue & nearby stays
West Den Haag, 102 Lange Voorhout, Den Haag, Netherlands
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