Ren Scateni

“There’s a reason why everybody hates Batman in those movies,” comments one of the titular protagonists in Omar Chowdhury’s BAN♡ITS. Set in a liminal space between Bangladesh and India, the film follows a group of self-proclaimed “destitutes” who rob the rich to give to the poor and are obsessed with Heath Ledger, because “he died for his art.” Inhabiting a lawless limbo where radical credos coexist with state-sanctioned anarchic stances these outlaws are as porous and opaque as Chowdhury’s film itself.

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.

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.

Through a multilayered construction of archive materials, digitised as well as contemporary pictures, and original footage, De Vos charts their journey to the beaches of Atopia—a placeless place, brimming with both mesmerising potentiality and impossibility, a place you could be homesick for without being able to locate it exactly. As elusive as this promised land it invites viewers to, Atopia refuses easy classifications and finds a transitory place between fiction and documentary, between imagined ethnographic investigation and a research-led use of archival videos and photos to back up De Vos’s personal cognitive meanderings.