Karina Griffith is an artist, researcher, and film programmer for Berlinale Forum Expanded. She recently completed her PhD dissertation, “Flânoirie: The Moving Images of Black German Cinemas” at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute, and is currently Guest Professor of Intersectional Visual and Media Theory at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). Her films, installations, and performances have been shown at international galleries and festivals, and in 2025, she was a fellow at the Vila Sul residency in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. Along with Enoka Ayemba, Jacqueline Nsiah, Biene Pilavci, and Can Sungu, Griffith programmed Fiktionsbescheinigung, a retrospective programme of Black and POC German films for the Berlinale Forum (2021-2023). Griffith has curated film and interdisciplinary programmes for the Goethe Institute, Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, Oberhausen Film Festival, and VTape, among others.
Karina Griffith
Karina Griffith participated in “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025, a first-ever poll of its kind as a collective love letter to the art of short-form moving image. yanco and Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, in collaboration with Talking Shorts, invited filmmakers, curators, distributors, critics, and scholars worldwide to nominate 10 audiovisual works under sixty minutes that they personally consider the “greatest” of all time. This was Karina Griffith’s submission:
| Movie | Original Title | Director | Country | Year | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A Lover and a Killer of Colour | Wanjiru Kinyanjui | Germany | 1988 | 9’ | ||
A portrait of female empowerment in the shadow of a still-divided Germany. The film channels its defiance through a lyrical soundtrack that recasts Black crativity — writing, painting — as acts of resistance to white supremacy. |
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| Illusions | Julie Dash | USA | 1982 | 34’ | ||
| Hand Tinting | Joyce Wieland | Canada, USA | 1967 | 6’ | ||
| If You Don’t Watch the Way You Move | Kevin Jerome Everson | USA | 2023 | 12’ | ||
| The Devil's Workshop L'Atelier du Diable | Euzhan Palcy | France | 1981 | 26’ | ||
François Truffaut encouraged Palzy's career during her studies in France; this calling-card filmm was a precurser to the Martinique-based Caribbean classic, Sugercane Alley, |
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| I, Your Mother Man Sa Yay | Safi Faye | Germany, Senegal | 1980 | 59’ | ||
The surreal elements of this film about a foreign student in West Berlin film give the all-too-real expectations of the his family back home in Senegal as sense of foreboding. |
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| Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification | Barbara McCullough | USA | 1979 | 6’ | ||
| Black Girl La noire de... | Ousmane Sembène | France, Senegal | 1966 | 59’ | ||
| Looking for Langston | Isaac Julien | United Kingdom | 1989 | 45’ | ||
| Lloyd Wong, Unfinished | Lesley Loksi Chan | Canada | 2025 | 29’ | ||