What are we looking to replicate or reflect when we construct a list of the “greatest films of all time”? The canon is encoded in many of our educations and structures many of our discussions about film—whether we are anti-canon or not. So with exercises such as this newest effort, we are telling ourselves what we already know.

Loveboard speaks to an era in which relationships are increasingly preserved through digital archives and the large amount of digital detritus this generates. Our personal troves of images have grown significantly in recent decades. The availability and cost of film stock constrained people to choose what to archive, and therefore, to also curate the image of their past. In this sense, digital media is counterintuitive, even antithetical to curatorship: it has the ability to seemingly conserve everything, including moments that seem utterly inconsequential, even banal, that are valued only in retrospect (if at all).

Curated by Inge Coolsaet for argos, the short film programme “Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other?” responds to the ever-present police brutality by rejecting futile rhetoric and underlining the urgency and affective power of audio-visual art. This potentially intimidating viewing experience may unsettle viewers’ expectations, but it can also transform the apathetic spectator into an active, reflexive watcher.

Christine Moderbachers Lettre à Mohamed (2013) is een audiovisuele brief in de puurste vorm. Door gebruik te maken van de grenzeloze mogelijkheden van het format, lijkt de film op geen enkele andere manier te kunnen bestaan. Wij, als kijkers, weten nauwelijks iets over de titulaire Mohamed. Hij heeft Tunesië verlaten, zoveel is duidelijk, en nu krijgt hij de veranderingen te zien die sindsdien in zijn land hebben plaatsgevonden, vanuit het perspectief en de opnames van zijn bevriende filmmaker.

Curator Inge Coolsaet’s argos programme “War Is Not Over” surveys polymorphic responses to some of the major historical conflicts still haunting the West, hybridising once more the space between war and spectacle, reality and fiction—an opportunity for distraction, if not reflection, before we turn to the news cycle again.

Foreignness always operates in varying degrees and can easily be internalised as self-exoticisation or through voluntary and involuntary alienation. Nevertheless, watching a film about your home country through a foreign gaze is always a startling experience. The images appear uncannily alien, akin to a non-native speaking in your mother tongue: no matter how impeccable their linguistic knowledge and proficiency, their intonations inevitably inhabit an absence, turning familiar words into strange, peculiar objects.

Juliette Le Monnyer’s Ramallah, Palestine, décembre 2018 (2025) wants us to bear witness. Within a tight ten-minute running time, this minimalist film unfolds as a controlled documentation of one moment of colonial violence during Israel’s occupation of Palestine—almost unremarkable in its sickening mundanity, even tame when compared to the genocidal atrocities livestreamed over the last twenty-three months.

Over the last thirty years, Sarah Pucill’s films have shown a sustained engagement with feminist politics, surrealist aesthetics, and the material language of cinema. Her work is connected by a visual and conceptual vocabulary that keeps evolving. Figures, motifs, and techniques reemerge—the principle of continuity is key to understanding how the artist’s work coheres, drawing strength from its self-reflection.