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1-14 of 14
- Jazz and decolonization are entwined in this historical rollercoaster that rewrites the Cold War episode that led musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach to crash the UN Security Council in protest against the murder of Patrice Lumumba.
- Based on the book of The Shadow World, this feature length documentary is an investigation into the multi-billion dollar international arms trade.
- Director Johan Grimonprez casts Alfred Hitchcock as a paranoid history professor, unwittingly caught up in a double take on the cold war period. Subverting a meticulous array of TV footage and using 'The Birds' as an essential metaphor, DOUBLE TAKE traces catastrophe culture's relentless assault on the home, from moving images' inception to the present day.
- In Blue Orchids, Grimonprez creates a portrait diptych of two experts situated on opposite ends of the same issue--the global arms trade. The stories of Chris Hedges, the former war correspondent of The New York Times, and Riccardo Privitera, a former arms and equipment dealer of Talisman Europe Ltd (now dissolved), provide an unusual and disturbing context for shocking revelations about the industry of war. While interviewing Privitera and Hedges for Grimonprez's recently released feature length film Shadow World, it became clear that the two men were describing the same anguish but from paradoxical perspectives. One has dedicated his life to unmasking lies and the other has built his life on lies. Making use of both their personal and political histories, Grimonprez gradually reveals the depths of trauma and duplicity, situating the arms trade as a symptom of a profound illness: greed.
- In this short film by Johan Grimonprez, philosopher/neurologist Raymond Tallis argues that consciousness is not an internal construct, but rather relational. Through the intriguing notion that humans are physically unable to tickle themselves, Tallis explores the philosophical notion that we become ourselves only through dialogue with others.
- In 1515 Machiavelli stated that it would be better for the Prince to be feared, than loved. Some 500 years later, Michael Hardt, political philosopher and co-author of Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth, asks what it would mean to base a political system on love, rather than on fear. How can we transform a society that is increasingly defined by a permanent state of war and cultivated by an industry of fear? How can we realize the paradigm shift necessary to move away from a reality that depends on the exploitation of people and the cult of privatizing public resources? Hardt looks for an answer in what he calls 'the commons', by which he refers not only to natural resources, but also to the languages we create- and the relationships we conceive together. In the dystopian city-state Alphaville, of Godard's eponymous film, all words and concepts relating to the idea of love and affection have been banned. When actress Anna Karina tries to express her feelings, she has to reinvent the words, for the concept of love is foreign to her. Like the protagonist in Alphaville, Hardt suggests that we need to redefine the tools to act politically together. Hardt embarks on a journey to identify the transformative powers of the ongoing struggle to re-invent democracy. Within this struggle he understands 'the commons' as an antidote against a society run by fear; an inspiration for a paradigm that is based on dialogue and cooperation.
- In January 1999, at the height of the Lewinsky-Clinton affair, Herman Asselberghs and Dieter Lesage asked me if I would be in for a trip to Lost Nation. They explained this was part of a project they were setting up in Brussels: a place slash library slash installation about vanished nations such as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, East and West Germany, USSR, and Zaire. Intriguing, so I thought, and I told them I was in. But where was Lost Nation? And, since it was lost, where could we find it? Browsing through their library, Herman and Dieter stumbled onto Lost Nation, an American village located on Highway 136 in Eastern Iowa, with a community of 497 citizens. Would I be interested to check it out? Sure. And so, this little road movie was the result. A trip to a nation where the average citizen spends about 5 years of his lifetime waiting in line, 2 years trying to reach people by telephone, 1 year searching for misplaced objects, 8 months opening junk-mail and 6 months sitting at traffic lights. A nation that attempted to impeach the wrong president.
- In Three Thoughts on Terror, investigative journalists Robert Fisk, Jeremy Scahill and Vijay Prashad approach the concept of terror from their respective angles. Fisk dismantles terror as a term that is rendered meaningless to alienate political movement from its origins: justice and injustice. Scahill points out that terror is a relative term, as its interpretation depends on which side of the bombing you're on. Using the absurd example of the 'The Hague Invasion Act', he shows how the US sticks its thumb in the eye of international law: "Some republicans in the US Congress were discussing putting forward legislation that they referred to as "The Hague Invasion Act", the idea that if US personnel were ever to be brought to The Hague on war crimes charges, the US could deploy military forces to The Hague to snatch those personnel and liberate them from the evil clutches of international law." Vijay Prashad takes rather a philosophical approach, reciting Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz: "what you see around you, leaves you with no obligation but to feel something. And if that feeling cannot be controlled, you have to do something about it. You can't refuse this world.
- When asked a question on politics, late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once answered: "I write about love to expose the conditions that don't allow me to write about love." In Two Travellers to a River Palestinian actress Manal Khader recites such a poem by Mahmoud Darwish: a concise reflection on how things could have been.
- Kobarweng reconstructs the first encounter between a remote village set in the highlands of the island of New Guinea and the outside world. Mainly told through a native narrative, it reclaims the memory of a colonial past. Switching the roles of observer and observed, it is anthropology-and specifically the desire underlying anthropological representation, that is depicted as an object of curiosity destabilized by the villager's questions. Point of departure was Kaiang Tapior's question "Where is your helicopter?", a remark which puzzled the filmmaker during his visit to the village of Pepera. The question reflected an event which took place in June of 1959, when a crew of scientists, which included anthropologists, dropped down from the sky in helicopters-much to the terrified surprise of the villagers who watched in awe at these things out of the sky, the likes of which they had never seen before - The sudden arrival of helicopters announced a crucial juncture in the history of the village which 'Kobarweng' critically re-stages through an examination and juxtaposition of archival anthropological footage and the villager's testimonies.
- In 1980 an extraordinary demonstration hit the streets of the Brazilian city of Sorocaba. Under the military dictatorship, a court had outlawed kisses that undermined public morals. The ruling by Judge Manuel Moralles, which punished such kisses with jail terms, described them this way: Some kisses are libidinous and therefore obscene, like a kiss on the neck, on the private parts, etc., and like the cinematographic kiss in which the labial mucosa come together in an unmistakable expansion of sensuality. The city responded by becoming one huge kissodrome. Never had people kissed so much. Prohibition sparked desire and many were those who out of simple curiosity wanted a taste of the unmistakable kiss. "February 8. GENERAL SMOOCH" by Eduardo Galeano. From: "Children of the Days," first edition published in Mexico by Siglo XXI Editores Mexico, 2012.Translation copyright Mark Fried, Pinguin Books, London 2013.
- In the spring of 2011, during the Photomonth in Krakow, the artist collective Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin invited Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez to be part of ALIAS, an exhibition that asked artists to inhabit alternate personas and then create artworks as this non-existent third-person. This resulted in an exhibition of which none of the artists existed, as the fictional characters had taken over the creative process. Grimonprez was assigned to inhabit the renowned Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa wrote much of his oeuvre under multiple, alternative identities. Not so much pseudonyms or aliases but what he termed 'heteronyms' - invented personalities with detailed biographies and interweaving histories. Pessoa's 'The Book of Disquiet' became Grimonprez' the point of departure. All the film's footage was shot on iPhone, recapturing selected details from YouTube's endless growing archive, a world where 'heteronyms' abound. Images of the earthquake and the tsunami that had hit Japan in March that year, dominated the net. This resonated quietly with the world of disquiet Grimonprez was envisioning. In addition, Grimonprez invited Portuguese writer Isabel Sobral Campos to add a female voice to Pessoa's many male heteronyms while staying true to the original language of 'The Book of Disquiet'.
- Study of the history of happy endings. It starts with a casting in Los Angeles where children play love scenes from films, TV ads and YouTube videos. This low-budget film refers to vloggers and Facebook and ironically tackles our overconsumption of images.