How do communities remember histories that have been taken away from them? What happens when objects, images, and human remains stored in museums continue to shape lives generations later?
After years of collaborative filmmaking and research, Bagamoyo Film Collective is excited to present the pre-premiere screening of “Kilichobaki – What Remains.”
Set in Northern Tanzania, the documentary follows conversations sparked by the traveling research exhibition Marejesho and traces the lasting impact of colonial violence through family memories, photographs of looted objects, and ongoing struggles for restitution. Rather than treating colonial history as something distant or completed, the film reveals how it continues to live on in the present — in stories, identities, absences, and acts of resistance.
A thread of the film is the story surrounding the bust of Chief Mareale. Research connected to the “Marejesho exhibition” revealed that the bust actually depicts a young man named Malekola, who was forced during the colonial period to provide the facial cast used to create it.
The film documents the complex and emotional process of recasting the busts in collaboration with the Gipsformerei der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, where new casts were produced with the intention of returning them to the Mareale family and to the community in Northern Tanzania from which Malekola came. Through this process, Kilichobaki – What Remains opens up urgent questions about museum practice, historical responsibility, representation, and restitution.
Moving between Tanzania and Germany, personal memory and institutional archives, the film offers a powerful reflection on what it means to reclaim history — and who gets to decide how it is remembered.
Original version with English subtitles | 85 minutes | Directed by Imelder Munyaga & Judith Albrecht,
Reception after the screening.
Please register for the screening at: