© Poster detail Endless Echoes Within
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Among other things, the films deal with the personal search for a forgotten family history in South India, creative transformation after experiences of imprisonment, ritual tattooing practices in Thailand and gender norms in the Netherlands.
The Master’s degree programme “Visual Anthropology, Media and Documentary Practices” at the University of Münster is a part-time continuing education programme and is taught in English. The programme offers the opportunity to combine academic content with practical approaches and is tailored to the needs of students with professional activities.
The films:
THE RITUALIST (2025) by Atiruj Jerddeesakul
A young anthropologist embarks on a silent journey into the world of Sak Yant and explores the gestures, stories and beliefs that surround this practice. He moves through unfamiliar spaces, observes moments that seem at once mundane and strangely charged, and attempts to capture meanings that change with each closer look. His notes offer glimpses rather than answers, but it is precisely this uncertainty that draws him deeper into the spell. The more intense the journey becomes, the more he realises that understanding Sak Yant cannot be achieved through explanations alone, but by allowing himself – awkwardly and hesitantly – to be drawn into a world that slowly reveals itself to him.
ENDLESS ECHOES WITHIN by Himerria Wortham
“Endless Echoes Within” is an experimental ethnographic short film that follows visual artist Sherrick Enriquez as he rediscovers his artistic voice following his release from prison. Born out of a twelve-week “film lab”, the work traces a radical creative metamorphosis in which improvisation, site-specific performance and collaborative filmmaking become tools of self-discovery in the uncertain in-between space of reintegration. In collaboration with dancer and filmmaker Himerria Wortham and Sherrick’s childhood friend, filmmaker Eliyas Hamid Allah, the film stages a physical exploration of memories that gradually unfolds into a meditation on freedom, control and the lingering structures of captivity. Through striking visualisations of Sherrick’s inner world and the subtle, unspoken intimacy between the three participants, “Endless Echoes Within” reveals how the act of reconstructing one’s own life story – which is often passively shaped by institutions – can become an active, imaginative practice of self-revision in dialogue with others and an important strategy for maintaining agency under disempowering conditions.
THE UNCAPTURABLES – A GENDER NON REVEAL PARTY by Merel Raats
This experimental short film examines the cultural celebration of gender through gender reveal rituals in the Netherlands. The film, consisting of footage and private videos of gender reveal parties, births and birthdays, criticises commercialisation and focuses on the physicality of non-binary people. With the help of sound contrasts and deliberately reduced images, the film addresses how gender assignments begin before birth, shape childhood and influence the lives of trans and non-binary people. An auditory sensibility structures the editing of the film and treats the media representations of foetuses not as revelations but as rituals. The film asks: What effect does observing these practices of gender revelation have on those who do not locate themselves in the cisgender binary? The film refuses to give a clear answer.
A SHADOW OF A WOMAN by Geetanjali Gurlhosur
When the filmmaker realises that her father’s mother (Amma) is completely missing from the family archives and her father knows nothing about her, she sets out in search of an ancestor who died half a century ago. With only a name and a blurred photo from the 1970s, the filmmaker and her family sift through memories and records to find their ancestor and follow her trail through the villages of South India. But as opaque as the memory is, will this search still lead to the past or even change the present?
