Color/blindness in Sheri Hagen's Auf den zweiten Blick

This essay examines the themes of blindness and colorblindness and their possible intersections in the first feature film of the Nigerian German director Sheri Hagen, Auf den zweiten Blick / At Second Glance (2012). Expressly about living with blindness and not about race in Germany, the film instead invites the viewer to engage with the topic of colorblindness in an altogether indirect manner. Considered within the context of transnational film, I argue that Auf den zweiten Blick is representative of a (new) Black/Afro German Cinema that moves beyond expected parameters and bygone themes of "duty" and "hybridity." Hagen's film proffers a complex exploration of difference and its unfortunate vestibular twin, discrimination, that operate within the tension of invisibility and hypervisibility. Engaging with postcolonial discourses of epistemic violence and whiteness, this essay ultimately demonstrates the film's ambition of multiplicity and accessibility.