Embedded Files
keynote lecture at: Kino Climates, Ghent, April 3, 2026
What is it to be a cinephile in an age where millions of people are displaced? What does it mean to program films in a time where the evidence of state violence is bursting from the small portable screens in our pocket? What does it mean to sit back and relax in velvet chairs while the Israeli government voted an apartheid law that enables them to inflict death sentence on Palestinian lives? What does it mean to organize q&a’s while women are raped and murdered in Sudanese refugee camps? What does it mean to write subsidy files for our projects while racialised US workers are being threatened and detained without a form of process and Iranian lives are butchered between the horrors of the Islamist regime and the bombs of the imperialist West? (...)
Article on The Social Life of Film, in: Cinema of Commoning Editorial, Berlin, November 2024
The second edition of The Social Life of Film brought together 25 nomadic film collectives in the coastal town of Ostend for four days in early September 2024. The meeting was organized by Monokino and inspired by the first SLOF meeting, initiated the previous year in Copenhagen by the collectives PRISMS (Oslo) and Terrassen(Copenhagen). This gathering offered me the chance to be present as a guest within the finely woven social fabric of collectives — a privileged position from which I could observe, reflect and form some thoughts on the questions at stake in the field of autonomous film collectives active around the globe today. (...)
article with Reem Shilleh, in: MUBI Notebook, September 2024
This meeting takes place on shaking ground. Since October 7, words have different meanings. Caring about the ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza today is very different for Reem Shilleh, a Palestinian researcher and filmmaker, than it is for Gawan Fagard, a Belgian writer and scholar. How do we respond to this unfathomable reality from our respective backgrounds, and from our work in the field of the moving image? (...)
artikel met Reem Shilleh, in: Fantomas, September 2024
Dit gesprek vindt plaats op bewogen terrein. Woorden hebben sinds 7 oktober 2023 een andere betekenis. De blik op en bezorgdheid om de voortdurende etnische zuivering en genocide in Gaza zijn fundamenteel anders vanuit het standpunt van Reem Shilleh, Palestijnse onderzoeker en filmmaker, dan vanuit het standpunt van Gawan Fagard, Belgische schrijver en wetenschapper. Hoe reageren we op deze ondoorgrondelijke realiteit vanuit onze respectievelijke achtergronden en vanuit onze positie in de sector van het bewegende beeld? (...)
conference contribution to: Film Philosophy Conference, Espinho, Portugal, July 2024
Green Border is a film made out of rage. It was produced in a moment of absolute emergency, while people were starving on the Polish-Belarussian border. It is made as an outburst of indignation about the violence of (both Polish and Belarussian) states, using people as hybrid weapons to pressure, blackmail, manipulate and destabilize the European Union. According to director Agnieszka Holland, speaking at the Lincoln Centre during the New York Film Festival, this film does not only depict the reality at the Polish Belarussian border, instead, to paraphrase the director: “also demonstrates a dangerous evolution all around the European border zones where human lives are stigmatized, dehumanized and annihilated for the sake of our own safety and wellbeing” and where “laboratories for political propaganda are secretly installed.” All of this was happening far away from the cameras of mainstream media, as a state of emergency was issued in the border zone and the darkly forested area was walled off from medical aid, intervention of NGO’s was forbidden and human rights activists were not allowed in. Reporting both in images and in writing was made nearly impossible as also access to journalists was denied. (...)
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