Through numerous video essays in film and media theory, Kevin B. Lee has played a key role in developing the form of the so-called desktop film. The elegant meta-staging reflects the fact that his digital desktop is research tool, media archive and distribution channel at the same time. Lee’s first feature-length film in this style dissects a historical work of propaganda: In 2014, the “Islamic State” terror militia, then at the height of its territorial power, published an elaborately produced film entitled “Flames of War”, which many media outlets compared to the aesthetics of Hollywood blockbusters. Lee manages to abstract and defamiliarize the extreme violence of those images, but comes to the realisation that their ideological power cannot be decoded by the tools of film analysis alone. “Afterlives” broadens the perspective and looks for alternative models in dialogue with experts from the arts, political education and terrorism studies: They reconstruct destroyed cultural assets, develop strategies against extremist radicalisation and study what motivates people to leave terrorist groups. In all this, Lee’s intelligent essay never loses sight of the colonialist western image of the Middle East.

Jan-Philipp Kohlmann

What is left when everything fades away? An old photographer tries to reconstruct people and events by means of old photographs, but they keep slipping away from him, vanishing in the dark, washed away by the waves. In his 2D animated film, rendered in black and white, Anton Dyakov not only shows how memories are lost, but also how they sometimes haunt and overwhelm us – for example in the shape of a disturbing archive fragment of blurred war photos. “Black Box” deals with loss and grief from a personal, yet universal perspective, while referencing the culture of remembrance in the digital age which is increasingly managing – or seeking to manage – without the haptic assurance of a printed photo.

Marie Ketzscher

The collaborative artistic work of Menno de Noojer (son), Paul de Noojer (father) and Françoise de Noojer (mother), which oscillated between photography and experimental film, spanned almost fifty years. Rather than allowing posterity to label, categorise and, as the case may be, mothball their work, the three realised a final film together just before Paul de Noojer died, when he was already seriously ill. A last joint film as an exuberant self-homage, in which they combine experimental-documentary storytelling, performance, pixilation and stop motion, funny and sad moments, pathos and trash, a joy of putting on costumes and vulnerable nudity. With “Heaven is Blue? #2”, the Noojers celebrate life as a total work of art in which all processes of becoming human and all symptoms of decline have their place and death is a natural part of the whole.

Marie Ketzscher