Tropentag 2026:

Film Festival

Fifth Edition of Perspectives on Pastoralism Film Festival at TT26
Theme: Celebrating women pastoralists - co-creating spaces for more equitable solidarities

Tuesday 15 Sept. - 18:30-21:30 CEST
and Wednesday 16 Sept. 2026 - 19:00-22:00 CEST
location ZHG Building, University of Göttingen Main Campus

This year the Perspectives on Pastoralism Film Festival coincides with the United Nation’s International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists - 2026. The grassroots initiatives that led up to the creation of this year include a “Gender and Pastoralism” subgroup that did the first round of selection of films including pastoralist women, allies and scholars from all around the world.

For the TT26, we have selected films from this collection along with new films highlighting the 2026 Global Gathering of Pastoralist Women in Kathmandu. This global gathering offered an opportunity for pastoralist women to increase visibility of their contributions to extensive livestock production while networking and building international solidarities.

This film festival was started in 2019 with the vision of creating a space in which films created by pastoralists would be given priority, and films demonstrating more equitable relations would be given priority. For the first time, we will screen a film made by film festival founder Ann Waters Bayer. She is a pioneer in participative methods and bottom-up innovation practices in agricultural research and has been an active ally to pastoralists for nearly a half century. Also for the first time, we will screen an in-progress film Jireen - Sharing Land, through which the filmmakers explain what steps they are taking to decolonise the filmmaking process together with an agro-pastoral community.

Each evening of the film festival includes films that celebrate women pastoralists. For example, Tuesday includes a film introducing pastoralist women leaders in their communities in Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, and Spain. There are a number of short films that were collaboratively created by women pastoralists across the world together with filmmakers and academics as part of the preparation for the Kathmandu Global Gathering and reflection afterwards. These films create a stage from which an individual pastoralist woman can put forward the points that are most important to her. Country-specific networking and mutual solidarity between women pastoralists can be seen in films both nights of the film festival, on Tuesday with the Hungarian Pastoralist Women’s Group and on Wednesday with Ganaderas en Red, from Spain.

Each evening of the film festival also includes films made by women filmmakers that demonstrate why livestock mobility is important. These films show how it can be a sustainable strategy for producing livestock in environments with variable availability of vegetation over space and time. Too often, shepherding, herding, ranching, and pastoralism more generally are viewed as a male endeavor. The women featured in this films flip the narrative and make their work visible.

The Perspectives on Pastoralism Film Festival (www.pastoralistfilmfestival.com) is organised on behalf of the Coalition of European Lobbies for Eastern African Pastoralism (CELEP) by DITSL (German Institute for Tropical & Subtropical Agriculture), Agrecol Association for AgriCulture & Ecology and Vétérinaires Sans Frontières (VSF) Belgium.

Programme

Tuesday 15 September 2026 - 18:30-21:30 CEST

Celebrating Women Pastoralists Part I

18:30-19:10 CEST

Behind the Scenes – Decolonizing Collaboration with Pastoralist Communities

Opening of the 5th Edition Perspectives on Pastoralism Film Festival with Echi Gabbert and Ginno Ballo who will present content from their in-progress film about agro-pastoralism in Ethiopia.
This meeting shares the ongoing journey of collaborative filmmaking and project development in the agro-pastoral Arbore community in southern Ethiopia. It also explores what it means to protect community ownership.

The initiative Jireen - Sharing Land, a community-led film project, by Echi Gabbert and Ginno Ballo will be showed.

When Ethiopian co-creators were denied Schengen visas, completing the film in Europe would have been the easiest solution but it would also have reproduced the very hierarchies the collaboration sought to overcome. Instead, the team chose to preserve shared authorship and develop new forms of co-creation, allowing creative decisions to remain with the community. We will watch some of the footage in progress.

Our experience invites broader reflection: Decolonial collaboration is about language and participation and it is also about redesigning processes when existing structures undermine equity.

Participants are invited to discuss how filmmaking and international cooperation can move beyond damage-centred approaches toward collaborations that recognize pastoralist communities as experts on land, animals, health, culture, and their temporalities.

Celebrating Women Pastoralists Part II

19:20-21:30 CEST

Films and discussion

Wednesday 16 September 2026 - 19:00-22:00 CEST

Celebrating Women Pastoralists Part III

19:00-20:50 CEST

Films and discussion

Celebrating Women Pastoralists Part IV

21:00-22:00 CEST

Film

The Perspectives on Pastoralism Film Festival: 1st edition was launched at Tropentag 2019 in Kassel, Germany, and the 2nd at Tropentag 2022 in Prague, Czechia. The 3rd edition was at Tropentag 2024 in Vienna, Austria, prepared together with colleagues in the International Support Group for the IYRP 2026, and included a special thematic focus on camelids, to celebrate the International Year of Camelids in 2024. The 4th edition was organised at Tropentag 2025 in Bonn.