Our Trip to Africa

Our Trip to Africa (German: Unsere Afrikareise) is a 1966 Austrian avant-garde short film by Peter Kubelka, originally commissioned as a travel diary documenting a wild game hunt.

Kubelka was hired in 1961 by a couple from Wels, Austria, to document a hunting trip they were taking with three other people.

After returning to Vienna, he found that Listo-Film [de] was unable to make optical sound on 16 mm film.

Kubelka's editing was designed to create "synch events" in which image and sound are combined in unique ways.

[3] The film's final sequence, in which an indigenous man remarks "I like to visit your country if I find chance", is intended to address the asymmetric relationship between ethnographers and their subjects.

Their lawyers demanded that he turn over the film so they could destroy it; the parties reached an agreement that Kubelka would not screen Our Trip to Africa in their hometown.

[8] Filmmaker Ashim Ahluwalia included the film in his personal top ten (for The Sight & Sound Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time poll), writing: "Along with Buñuel’s Las Hurdes, Unsere Afrikareise is an understanding of all documentary as a form of colonisation.