In 1998, Semira Adamu, a 20-year-old Nigerian immigrant, died on Belgian soil of suffocation under a police pillow. Twenty years later, two women tell her story in a cry for justice. Through this film, they highlight the reality of detention centres: the harsh conditions of confinement, the suffering of detainees and the abuse by guards and police officers.
The thaw of the so-called eternal snow of Páramo, a neotropical alpine ecosystem in the high Andes, exposes a layer of meaning about the origins and survival of the landscape.
Mexico, October 2011. A mysterious dream gives birth to Cuco, a transgender latex pirate activist. This essayistic film follows their quest to create more recognition for the queer community.
Drawing on digital memories and using online tools such as Google Maps, Aulona Fetahaj reflects on how it feels to be the child of refugees in the digital age.
An introspective essay about the search for a place between reality and imagination: a placeless place made up out of dreams and a longing for fluidity. Slowly, the grains of the compressed image become the sands of the atopic beach, revealing an imaginary place.
Punk author Kathy Acker’s work is the starting point for a conversation about gender identity and body transformation and is linked to the punk movement of the 1970s and 1980s.
This is a cinematic letter to the title character, who left Tunisia and now lives in Belgium. Shot in the first year after the Tunisian revolution, this is a poetic journey through a troubled landscape. Between order and chaos, the film reveals a land of disillusionment but also of humour and hope.
Filmmakers Paul Shemisi and Nizar Saleh embark on a journey from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Germany to screen their latest film. However, during a layover in Angola, their trip takes a harrowing turn when airport authorities question the authenticity of their documents.
Using images shared on the Internet by Israelis during the Gulf War, the First Intifada, and trance music gatherings, Shuruq Harb paints the portrait of a Palestinian teenager in the 1990s. In the midst of Israeli pop culture and the political climate of the Oslo Accords, she comes to grips with her anxiety.
Irani Bag is a split-screen video essay that questions the alleged innocence of handbags in post-revolutionary Iranian cinema. In doing so, Maryam Tafakory provides a robust political analysis of censorship and intimacy.
After the revolution in 1979, Iran prohibited the depiction on the silver screen of men and women touching. Since then, directors have relied on every cinematic trick in the book to mirror ecstatic tension. Nazarbazi collages these intense cinematic moments into a poem about love and desire.
Zuza Banasińska reinvents the famous Slavic witch Baba Yaga through a clever montage of films from the Polish Educational Film Studio archive, containing sexist content. Questioning their own non-binary identity, they unleash the queer dimension of found footage tasked with conveying a normative conception of identity.
In 2014, artist and forensic audio analyst Lawrence Abu Hamdan examined audio files of the shots that killed Nadeem Nawara and Mohamed Abu Daher in the West Bank of Palestine. Rubber Coated Steel does not preside over the voices of the victims but seeks to amplify their silence.
The Inextinguishable Fire is a critique of the Vietnam War and the role of industry in the production of chemical weapons. In analysing the dissemination and consumption of images, Harun Farocki reveals the inextricable links between media culture, politics, and violence.
A polemical, avowedly personal video documentary on the American Black gay experience. Marlon Riggs celebrates Black men loving Black men as a revolutionary act.
In this documentary essay, Harun Farocki shows that the famous Lumière brothers’ sequence of the same title already carries within itself the germ of a foreseeable social development: the eventual disappearance of this form of industrial labour.
Clips sampled from films, newscasts, sporting events, music videos, and citizen videos traverse the twentieth century, focusing on the lives of Black people set against the backdrop of systemic racism and White supremacism. Taken as a whole, Jafa’s montage comprises a poignant, visceral meditation on African American identity and history.
Maryam Tafakory creates an intimate inner world that moves between the concrete and the abstract. Layers of found and original footage are superimposed to fill in some of the cracks, the deletions, the limits of representation. Mast-del is a love song that would never pass through censorship.
Using newsreel footage and a song by Lena Horne, Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez fired off Now!, one of the most powerful bursts of 1960s propaganda. Made almost entirely from existing newsreel footage, the film tackled the pressing political issues of the time, from racism to imperialism.
Through dancing, The Motherfucker’s Birthday shows the evil of the dictator and the horror people endure under powerful political leaders. The film presents dancing, a universal and uniquely human activity often representing joy, with eerie footage of Saddam and his sons’ torture tools while they dance.
Long still frames, text, and sound are woven together to unfold the narrative of an anonymous group that fills its time by plotting distances. Innocent measurements give way to political ones, examining how image and sound communicate history.
Obtaining official documents is a symbol of coveted freedom and security for migrants. But how do you navigate the administrative labyrinth? This film explores the relationship between identity, race, and European bureaucracy.
By making its central character ever-changing, Tukuleur attempts to show how our gaze influences the interpretation of different bodies in different contexts. The film shows the consequences of these gazes and their linked representations for the personal growth of the character.
A young lad dresses up for an annual round of trick-or-treating with his school friends in this 1960 public service announcement. However, their night’s haul won’t benefit themselves.
