leff's opening lecture asks how the essay film can respond to the invisual — the hidden systems of data, algorithms, and labour that shape how images are produced, processed, seen, and unseen.
Night after night, an activist in Amsterdam cannot sleep, kept awake by sixteen hours of screen time and an endless barrage of violent images from around the world.
Peer into the lives of tech workers, and their perspectives on big tech and data, through a personal tour of their phones.
In his latest desktop documentary, Lee unpacks with a forensic style the visuals of the War on Terror and ISIS propaganda. Through digital archives, cultural artefacts and artistic research, he asks: “how can we collectively resist the act of forgetting?
Love-22-Love
Driven by the desire to defeat his demons, artist Jeroen Kooijmans pays tribute in Love-22-Love to art, his love for his wife, and the dark corners of his psyche. At the lowest point of his life, love serves as a remedy.
A reproduction of an American leaflet is mistakenly taken for a bomb threat at an exhibition by Rabih Mroué. In his lecture-performance, he reflects on the unstable relationship between images, politics and reality.
Listening to the Archive
Listening to the Archive explores the colonial sound archive as both a record of extraction and a site of renewed listening. Bringing together two distinct approaches—an imageless film composed entirely from archival recordings and a radiophonic work that critically engages with a museum collection—the program considers how acts of listening can challenge inherited narratives, reveal archival absences, and open new ways of encountering colonial histories.
An imageless film, sounds from a repatriated colonial archive are interrogated to construct an emancipatory relistening to sounds collected through colonial violence.
A relistening and reinterpretation of colonial recordings of New Guinea made in 1961 by Michael Rockefeller, heir to the Standard Oil family.
Expanded cinema work, utilising several filmmaking techniques and narrative tropes to understand Mass Psychogenic Illness (MPI) as a strategy of disruption in the factories of Singapore.
An image unfurls slowly and enigmatically. So too do childhood memories of women, loss and disappearance, narrated meditatively like a meandering river.
A collage of personal archival footage reveals the history of a semi-utopian, metaphorical city, where all the streets are named after poets. When war begins, upheaval leads to confusion and residents find themselves lost amid the memories of the forgotten poets.
A visual and psychological investigation regarding the shooting down of an airplane in which digital artefacts sourced online by the artist are combined with audio recordings from the control tower and a poignant voice-over.
The evolution of witchcraft through the ages is traced in this proto-essay film made over 100 years ago. Stunning monotone vignettes form a visionary blend of fictionalised documentary and horror film. This silent film will have live sound performed by members of Sticky Buttons Records.
A docu-fiction that explores the erasure of female history in the Uyghur region of China through a conversation between the director and Gülem, a forgotten goddess of carpet weaving.
A two-channel investigation into the alternative geopolitical framework constructed by the self-regulatory governing body of international football, the highly disputed FIFA.
A hypnotic essay film examining the arrival of the internet in the small Romanian town of Buhuși. How do the residents navigate the gap between polished online imaginaries and the post-industrial realities of everyday life?
A reflection on how early 20th century industrialization and capitalist expansion increased the pressure on sponge divers on the Greek island of Kalymnos to push their bodies to the limit.
