Collective Film

This work of docufiction, filmed in collaboration with the Quechua community of the Altiplano plateau, bears witness to the secret sterilizations of women carried out by American health workers as part of the Peace Corps in Bolivia. In a stark narrative about powerlessness, intransigence, and grief, the camera absorbs the faces of the local people and the high mountain landscape. The soundtrack, created by the Teatro Collasuyo group, creates a raw composition from ambient noises, sobs, and traditional instruments. The title refers to a sacred Andean bird, which becomes a metaphor for the sacrifice and resistance of the indigenous people against colonialism and violence. “[The Blood of the Condor] is furious, lyrical, and unflinching—though it stops short of becoming didactic. In lieu of a traditional distribution strategy, Sanjinés and his team travelled around the Altiplano and small villages of western Bolivia with a projector, speakers, and a generator, showing the film on a white sheet. Sanjinés estimates 250,000 Bolivians saw the film, and protests in the capital inspired by the film’s critical portrayal of US intervention led to the expulsion of the Peace Corps from Bolivia in 1971.” — Lucia Ahrensdorf, Notebook Primer: The Grupo Ukamau Source: Mubi Notebook

Visual and audio fragments from media archives are interwoven with the voices of immigrants from the Caribbean, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, who made up the majority of the population of Birmingham's Handsworth district. It was here that unexpectedly violent riots broke out in the fall of 1985. Footage of damaged streets intersects with testimonies of police brutality, photographs from community archives contrast with official memorials, and politicians' comments alternate with poetic voice-overs. The layered audio and visual montage create a political essay that challenges stereotypical images of immigrant communities and seeks new ways to tell their stories. “When I wrote: ‘A Black teen bolts down a road, outruns four policemen, misses the slash of a baton, is brought down by a shield. They kettle him in, officer after officer after officer, piling on as he struggles to rise. They, now 8 against 1, shove him against a wall, where children are sitting and watching’ I couldn’t help recalling George Floyd’s death and the countless other Black men and women hunted and murdered in the UK and across the globe. It feels momentous to integrate audio description into a film that resonates so viscerally today.” — Elaine Lillian Joseph, Audio Description Script Source: Slow emergency siren, ongoing

An intimate film about the experience of a man caught between East and West, between mother and father, silence and communication, combining family photographs and home Super 8 footage with fictionalized reconstructions of the filmmaker's childhood. The events of his life—his relationship to Western culture and to his father, who embodied it, his departure from Sri Lanka and settlement in Great Britain—are repeatedly rewritten. Shifting emphases and building tension between different interpretations create an image of identity that resists unambiguous understanding and remains in motion, open and changeable. “Being a Portuguese Burgher from Sri Lanka living in England means I am neither fully of the East nor fully of the West. I am somewhere in between, like a nomad, always in transit, without roots or foundations. This gives me an identity that, like my speech, is unstable, insecure, and tempered. I feel that somewhere in that soundless shadowland, between my thinking and my speaking, lies the real expression of who I am.”

The camera accompanies Senegalese artist Joe Ouakam (real name Issa Samb, 1945–2017) on his restless wanderings through Dakar, listening to his poems and reflections, recording small performances and his perceptiveness – his ability to let himself be permeated by people and places. The film centres on Ouakam’s outdoor studio at 17 Jules Ferry Street – a space he intensely inhabited and transformed, where he created and destroyed his works. This address was also the meeting place for the radical art collective, Laboratoire Agit'Art, of which he was a co-founder. “People always felt that they knew him, because his figure was so familiar and visible in the streets of Dakar where he regularly walked to feel the city’s breath and life. But this impression was quite wrong, because Issa Samb was a mystery and an enigma.” — Aboubacar Demba Cissokho, “Issa Samb ‘Joe Ouakam’ All-Round Artist” (obituary) Source: Issa Samb "Joe Ouakam" All-Round Artist

The material for this compilation guerrilla video was created thanks to the work of nearly thirty filmmakers who, using the then-new Portapak portable cameras, recorded from within the protest movement the mass demonstrations to end the Vietnam War that were held in early May 1971 in Washington, D.C. Footage of participants' discussions, strategy planning, and spontaneous happenings alternate with the documentation of police violence, stays at police stations, and improvised detentions. The first edited version tried in vain to get airtime on NBC, while the updated version of the original compilation adds informational subtitles for today's viewers and underscores the hope that the established order and repressive power can be overcome non-violently through solidarity and shared emotion. “Liberate ourselves. Men and women together.”

The film serves as a direct response to Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s statement questioning the very existence of the Palestinian people. Through direct interviews with Palestinians in refugee camps and archival footage and photographs, it paints a picture of the emergence of the Zionist movement, the actions of international political actors, the various stages of the ongoing colonization of what was originally Palestinian territory, and the development of Arab counter-reactions in the form of various emancipation movements. “It should be clear that Newsreel came about neither because a group of people sat down and plotted its existence, nor quite by accident either. Rather, it came into being because of political/social events, and a general ferment within the New York filmmaking community. And, not only in New York, but internationally also. There was no specific idea to create a Newsreel, but rather when the occasion presented itself, the need seemed logical, the necessity self-evident.” — Allan Siegel, Some Notes About Newsreel And Its Origins Source: Newsreel Collective

In this video essay, the polysemy of iron is mined like a rare ore and smelted into a wealth of unexpected synergies: the stellar origin of iron is linked to its presence in human veins and in the geological layers of the Earth. The moose's sense of magnetic north and south intertwines with images of the Arctic landscape, in which the rusty remains of military equipment lie scattered. Fungi and bacteria that feed on iron are absorbed into the motif of a hunting knife. Between the cosmos and the individual, nature and technology, life and civilization, an iron bond is formed, which is commented on in dialogue and occasional unison by a girl's and a woman's voice. “The word ‘raqs’ in several languages denotes an intensification of awareness and presence attained by whirling, turning, being in a state of revolution. Raqs [Media Collective] takes this sense to mean ‘kinetic contemplation’ and a restless and energetic entanglement with the world, and with time.” Source: Raqs Media Collective

Rafah, a city on the border between Gaza and Egypt, became the target of four days of bombing after the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier on August 1, 2014. The Forensic Architecture collective analysed footage from mobile phones and satellite images and compiled an accurate spatiotemporal model of the events using synchronization, 3D modelling, and examination of the shapes of smoke clouds, shadows, and craters. This served as evidence for Amnesty International, which did not have physical access to the area, to accuse Israel of war crimes. Pure work with digital traces is transformed here into an image of the world—a detective visualization of destruction and its impact on the civilian population. “Today, artists are engaged in investigation. They probe corruption, human rights violations, environmental crimes and technological domination. At the same time, areas not usually thought of as artistic make powerful use of aesthetics. Journalists and legal professionals pore over opensource videos and satellite imagery to undertake visual investigations. This combination of diverse fields is what the authors call ‘investigative aesthetics’: the mobilisation of sensibilities associated with art, architecture and other such practices in order to speak truth to power.” — Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth, Verso Books, 2021

The Lettrist manifesto of disjunctive film aesthetics, with its inventiveness and sly irony, disrupts the alliance between image and sound, speech and language, meaning and movement. Audiovisual DJing employs manual mixing and the scratching of audio and photographic materials. It grafts uncompromising rhetoric onto aimless wandering through the suburbs of Paris, underpins dissenting cries with mantric recitations, and twists the romantic plot into political commentary interspersed with cinematic graffiti and inverted film frames. The film culminates in unique recordings of Lettrist poetry of pure noise. “I was not, in my youth, particularly affected by cinema’s ‘Europeans’ […] perhaps because I, early on, developed an aversion to Surrealism—finding it an altogether inadequate (highly symbolic) envisionment of dreaming. What did rivet my attention (and must be particularly distinguished) was Jean-Isidore Isou’s Treatise: as a creative polemic it has no peer in the history of cinema.” — Stan Brakhage Source: “Inspirations”, in The Essential Brakhage, ed. Bruce McPherson (New York: McPherson & Co., 2001), pp. 208–9.