COUSIN, founded in 2018, is a collective of artists and filmmakers descending from North American indigenous peoples. COUSIN’s mission is to “build an indigenous cinema movement”, which it does through multiple forms of support for cinema developed by people who work with and speculate about this cultural legacy. Over the years, its founding members — Sky Hopinka, Adam Khalil, Alexandra Lazarowich and Adam Piron — and others who have participated in the collective have achieved broad visibility and critical acclaim at some of the world’s leading museums, art venues and film festivals.

In dialogue with Batalha’s artistic team, the collective will present an important part of its body of work for the first time in Portugal. This programme of four days will illustrate the critical vitality of several of their film and performance projects, which are diverse in terms of both form and genre and intersect artistic, fictional and documentary cinema. It is indeed difficult to label COUSIN’s practice, and perhaps the most distinctive feature of the collective’s work is the breadth of cinematic styles they employ, and the emotional and highly intimate manner in which they handle their key themes: the complexity of belonging in today’s world, the wounds of intercultural relations, and the possible meanings of “origin” in contemporary Western society.