The Darkening of Europe: Afrofuturist Ambitions and Afropessimist Fears in Damir Lukacevic’s Dystopian Film <i>Transfer</i> (2010)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Damir Lukacevic’s dystopian film Transfer (2010) is one of a handful of recent German films that use science fiction to respond to Germans’ anxieties about the influx of refugees in the last ten years. Adapted from a short story by Spanish author Elia Barcelò, Transfer introduces a technology of body-swapping that allows wealthy, older, white customers to have their minds transferred into the younger, healthier bodies of Africans in order to prolong their lives. In this essay I analyze Transfer against the context of German science fiction film history and Germans’ more recent interest in Afrofuturism to consider how Lukacevic uses the genre to critique contemporary German attitudes about race. By comparing the film’s tragic ending to the short story’s optimistic one, I argue that while there are several moments in the film that radically undermine German assumptions about race, identity, and nationality, the tragic ending sabotages potentially positive interventions in discussions about racism in Germany.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".