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Late 2010, I got commissioned by Leica to follow in the footsteps of James Bruce and document the Nile river from Alexandria to Aswan. I invited my friend Gheith El-Amine to join me on this trip. it was his first time in Egypt. December 10, 2010: we made plans to leave on February 1, 2011. He contacted two Egyptian friends of his, and we were supposed to meet them as soon as arrived there. January 25. The revolution started in Egypt. the only incoming images so far were made by protesters with cellular phones and uploaded on the net. They were much more efficient than the state-owned television station which was still doing the pro-regime propaganda in high definition resolution.

Part of an ongoing series of American psychogeographies, this particular piece investigates the idea of "remoteness," as two people establish a curious rapport in a sleepy Southern Californian suburb.

Rajee Samarasinghe is a Sri Lankan visual artist. His work often examines consciousness and impermanence. Some of his recent work develops questions into contemporary ethnographic practices. Rajee attended the University of California San Diego and is currently an MFA candidate at the California Institute of the Arts.

A silent poem reflecting on the place of my mother’s birth and her first traces on earth. A generational portrait of South Asian “makers” becomes a perceptual voyage into memory, experience, and touch. - Rajee Samarasinghe

Rajee Samarasinghe is a Sri Lankan visual artist. He received his BFA from the University of California San Diego and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Rajee`s work has been exhibited at venues internationally.

At the center of this film is a Sri Lankan woman accessing other places in digital form, while situated in her own physical reality. Navigating through a multitude of spaces from the natural world to man-made environments as well as virtual planes, traditional relationships between the creator, the tool, and the subject are questioned, shattered and reconstructed. Reflecting on my own practice as a filmmaker working in non-fiction, the film takes a collage-like approach to examining issues around representation, verisimilitude, the ethnographic image, and the limitations of the form itself. Shot on seven different cameras (and a video synthesizer) on both film and video over the course of a decade in Sri Lanka, China, and the United States, I delve into some of my fundamental curiosities as a filmmaker.

Rajee Samarasinghe was born and raised amidst the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. He later left for the United States where he is now based. He received his BFA from the University of California San Diego and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. His filmmaking practice was born out of a desire to understand the circumstances around his childhood and his work often navigates the terrain of memory, migration, and impermanence within the framework of deconstructing the ethnographic image and the colonial gaze in contemporary media. Rajee is currently working on his debut feature film, "Your Touch Makes Others Invisible," which explores post-civil war Sri Lanka—the project has received support from the Sundance Institute, Berlinale Talents' Doc Station, Field of Vision, and True/False Film Festival’s inaugural PRISM program. Rajee was also named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2020, and had solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival in 2021. His short films have been exhibited at venues internationally including the Tiger Short Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New Directors/New Films presented by Film Society of Lincoln Center & MoMA, MoMA Doc Fortnight, BFI London Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Festival du nouveau cinéma, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Slamdance, SFFILM Festival, REDCAT, CROSSROADS at SFMOMA, Vancouver International Film Festival, Guanajuato International Film Festival, Media City Film Festival etc. He’s received the Tíos Award for Best International Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Film House Award for Visionary Filmmaking at the Athens International Film + Video Festival, and an Honorable Mention Award at the Thomas Edison Film Festival among others.

Tracing the colonial gaze in both the ethnographic image and forms of dominant media, this short piece describes an impressionistic encounter with a woman seen from a great distance, who shields her face from a curious telescopic lens.

Rajee Samarasinghe is a filmmaker from Sri Lanka currently based in the United States. He received his BFA from UCSD and his MFA from CalArts. Rajee is currently working on his debut feature, "Your Touch Makes Others Invisible," inspired by his childhood experiences during the Sri Lankan civil war — the project received a Sundance Documentary Fund grant in 2019 and was invited to Berlinale Talents' Doc Station as well as True/False Film Festival’s inaugural PRISM program in 2020. He was also named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2020. Rajee's work has been exhibited at venues internationally including the Tiger Short Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New Directors/New Films presented by Film Society of Lincoln Center & MoMA, BFI London Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Festival du nouveau cinéma, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Slamdance Film Festival, REDCAT, SFFILM Festival, Media City Film Festival, Guanajuato International Film Festival etc. He's received the “Tíos Award for Best International Film” at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the “Film House Award for visionary filmmaking” at the Athens International Film + Video Festival, and an "Audience Award" at CROSSROADS at SFMOMA among others.

This associative stream of visuals, culled from the past, reflect on the roles of art, labor, and journalism in contemporary Sri Lanka, facing a dubious future ahead. Memory and ethnographic deconstruction cascade in an obliterated form, forging a dire and prescient assemblage.

Rajee Samarasinghe was born and raised amidst the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. He later left for the United States where he is now based. He received his BFA from the University of California San Diego and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. His filmmaking practice was born out of a desire to understand the circumstances around his childhood and his work often navigates the terrain of memory, migration, and impermanence within the framework of deconstructing the ethnographic image and the colonial gaze in contemporary media. Rajee is currently working on his debut feature film, "Your Touch Makes Others Invisible," which explores post-civil war Sri Lanka—the project has received support from the Sundance Institute, Berlinale Talents' Doc Station, Field of Vision, and True/False Film Festival’s inaugural PRISM program. Rajee was also named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2020, and had solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival in 2021. His short films have been exhibited at venues internationally including the Tiger Short Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New Directors/New Films presented by Film Society of Lincoln Center & MoMA, MoMA Doc Fortnight, BFI London Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Festival du nouveau cinéma, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Slamdance, SFFILM Festival, REDCAT, CROSSROADS at SFMOMA, Vancouver International Film Festival, Guanajuato International Film Festival, Media City Film Festival etc. He’s received the Tíos Award for Best International Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Film House Award for Visionary Filmmaking at the Athens International Film + Video Festival, and an Honorable Mention Award at the Thomas Edison Film Festival among others.

A symbiotic collaboration in movie motion. After Muybridge.

Rajee Samarasinghe is a relatively young imagemaker, once upon a time Sri Lankan. He makes fake narratives and destructive formal experiments. He aspires to make videos of a respectable length and standard. Rajee attended the University of California, San Diego and is currently an MFA candidate at the California Institute of the Arts.

Shot improvisationally in 2010, shortly after the end of the Sri Lankan civil war, this film takes a lyrical approach to examining recent history and the process of reconstruction in the post-war era. The visions of an exile are carried through an immoral silence, to an end both dubious and bittersweet.

Rajee Samarasinghe is an award-winning Sri Lankan filmmaker and visual artist. Some of his recent work examines contemporary ethnographic practices through associations of family and heritage. He received his BFA from the University of California San Diego and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Rajee`s work has been exhibited at venues internationally.

A détournement of Walter Benjamin`s "Theses on the Philosophy of History," reconfigured for an era dominated by the digital, the instability of the physical body, and the seeming triumph of technology over art and the virtual over the real. Is technology the handmaiden of art? Is art the handmaiden of technology? Or is the notion of a handmaiden so hopelessly obsolete, then it can no longer provide metaphors which provoke us to think?

Keith Sanborn is a media artist, theorist, translator, and curator based in New York.

This video was produced for an exquisite corpse project by Jason Simon to be screened on Bastille Day, 2012 in Narrowsburgh, NY. I added a title to my segment and kept the first second of picture from the previous video, the starting point for my work. The title was inspired by a remark of Paul Sharits. One of his assistants had just screened a test for him of an elaborate optical printer film. The title was his response. Also, the Stones played several times on the David Frost Show. Also James Brown was Black and Proud. Also I?m going to dye my hair black and you can?t stop me.

Keith Sanborn is a media artist, theorist, curator and translator based in New York.

A passage between two buildings, a nail salon, a stairwell, a badminton hall, an atrium, a hospital culvert. Life takes place. With the small details of existence in focus, rather than the larger narratives and conflicts, fragments are connected to a possible outcome. In mathematics, the word discrete is used to describe objects that are not continuous and separated from each other. Discrete mathematics is applied in a number of different areas such as encryption, databases, game theory, graph theory and algorithms.

Lucia Pagano and Vanja Sandell Billström were educated at the Lodz Film School and at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Discrete Mathematics is their second film as a duo which further explores methods developed in their previous film Park. Park was nominated to the Best Swedish Short at Göteborg Film Festival 2020, Tempo Short Award, 1KM Film Award, and winner of the Tempo Sound Award the same year. Previously they have shown their work at festivals and art venues around the world.

Scenes of people in motion. Some are working, others spend their leisure time. The sound of airplanes and subways reminds us of the city behind the piece of created nature. A short documentary with scenes from the parks of Stockholm taking place during one year.

Lucia Pagano (b. 1984) is a filmmaker and artist educated at the Film School in Lodz, and at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Her films focus on details in everyday life, often by observing seemingly meaningless fragments of reality, sometimes to absurdity. Her films have been shown at festivals around the world, like Sao Paolo, San Francisco, Kiev, and Warsaw and has been awarded or been honorary mentioned at film festivals in LA, Oberhausen, Stockholm, and at Nordic Panorama. Vanja Sandell Billström (f. 1983) is a filmmaker and artist educated at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She works both with documentary, staged situations and video installations. The films often revolve around everyday situations, and with characters that seemingly spontaneously reflect on everyday conditions or the situation that the film itself requires. Sandell Billström has earlier been nominated for the Guldbagge award, Best Swedish Short and exhibited at Göteborg Konsthall, Supermarket Art Fair, Box Gallery and Färgfabriken. ”Park” is their first film that they have directed together and it was nominated for Best Swedish Short at the Göteborg Film Festival, the Tempo Short Award, 1KM Film and won the Tempo Sound Award 2020.

A narrator takes you on a deep dive into the art world. What mechanisms are driving this ecosystem, or rather: which participants? The animation film "À la carte" takes a humorous look at the food chain in the art field and the challenges we face.

The artist duo consisting of Ellinor Aurora Aasgaard and Bror Sander Berg Størseth constantly serve up fresh perspectives on the world, tongue in cheek, jaws scraping off the ground. In their particular case form does not follow function, but function at least contains the word fun. The objects produced by the duo are caught in between form and function, art and design, discourse and disgust. For instance: portable paintings whose support structure doubles as shipping crates, and a mobile sculpture serving you social lubrication. Or high heeled shoes with built in brushes for an easy clean, and seats reserved for magazine covers. Aurora Sander reacts to the intrinsic structures of the art world, of socialization, distribution, value creation, judgement, and accruement, to turn some tables, but making sure the tables look damned good on the way round. The references in the work of Aurora Sander are plentiful, and the usual appropriation of low culture you traditionally would find in the art is repurposed with a refined knowledge of not just the art world, but also an interest in merchandizing and hanging out, dipping low. Their artistic strategies are closely linked to design, theater, and fashion; fields that art is struggling to keep at bay. Art historian Benjamin Buchloh describes this relationship as one where high art constantly appropriates images, strategies, and mechanisms from low culture, not in order to assimilate the two, but rather to reaffirm art's position in the hierarchy. Aurora Sander seems to confuse the hierarchy, and the identity of the duo, who might be mistaken for a singular artist, a case of mistaken identity, might range from a Disney princess to an emerging artist trying to make it in the cruel marketplace of the art world. Aurora Sander's strategy of confusion, fusion, fiction and friction, seems to be the duo's strength, making objects and creating characters that belong in the art world, but have no idea how they got there.

Mary MacLane, the Wild Woman of Butte, Montana, published her diaries in 1902 and 1917. As an out queer and proto-feminist at the turn of the century, MacLane became notorious upon the publication of her 1902 diary, I Await the Devil’s Coming. She was whisked away from the industrial hellscape of her copper mining Montana hometown to a life in the public eye as an author, journalist, female film pioneer and always a provocateur - sending up social norms throughout her career, with a special focus on staid notions about women and sexuality. Between my flesh and the world’s fingers is an experimental essay and diary film primarily based on her published diaries and her film work. Though the film is not directly a personal film, the production is founded in part in the act of a woman telling her own story through that of another woman, a trailblazing figure from the past.

Talena Sanders makes moving image works that explore the development of individual and collective senses of identity in affinity groups. Her films and videos are informed by an interest in presenting the many ways that social institutions can shape individuals lives on both the broader geopolitical level and the most intimate, personal scales. A common starting point for developing new projects begins with an interest in interrogating narratives from histories and how historical records can influence senses of identity, especially as it relates to ideas of national and regional character. She believes there are endless means to present and interrogate materials from the real on the spectrum from nonfiction to narrative production approaches. Her work often places historical found/archival footage and audio in dialogue with contemporary media captured on location to question constructs of privilege and power in who gets authorized to tell the story of a shared experience. She holds an MFA from Duke University’s Experimental and Documentary Arts program and a BFA from the University of Kentucky. Her work has been screened, exhibited, and collected internationally, including at the New York Film Festival`s Views from the Avant-Garde, FID Marseille, Montreal International Documentary Festival, Fronteira Festival, Viennale, DokuFest Kosovo, BFI London Film Festival, and Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. Her first feature documentary, Liahona, is distributed by Documentary Educational Resources and Doc Alliance. She has previously taught film and video production and film studies at Duke University and the University of Montana. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Sonoma State University.

Chechnya, Grozny, spring 2021. The city's landscapes are filled with portraits of Putin, Kadyrov Senior, and Kadyrov Junior. They watch me from every corner, infiltrating my thoughts. It’s almost impossible to believe and accept. I perceive the totalitarianism these portraits convey, viewing them intentionally through a distorted lens. I film the streets of my hometown, Grozny, from behind the tinted windows of a car, knowing that such actions put me at risk of persecution. I document a moment when fascism begins to take root in Russia—a time when, after 30 years of the Chechen people's struggle for independence, the focus shifts to indoctrinating children. In 2022, over 12,000 soldiers from Kadyrov's army are sent to war in Ukraine.

Vladlena Sandu was born in Crimea, Ukraine (USSR), in 1982 and grew up in Grozny, Chechnya, during four years of war. She graduated from VGIK in 2016 with a degree in film directing. In 2019, she completed a postgraduate degree in Art at VGIK in Aesthetics, publishing several academic articles. In 2019 graduated Boris Yukhananov's Studio for theater direction. Her works have been presented at international festivals such as the Rotterdam Film Festival, Berlinale, DocLisboa, GoEast, Movies That Matter, ZagrebDox, Geneva International Film Festival, DOK Leipzig, and others, earning international awards. At the start of the Russian war against Ukraine in March 2022, Sandu fled Russia and is now based in Amsterdam. There, she completed No Nation Without Culture about regime in Chechnya, which won Best Short Film at GoEast IFF 2023. In 2023, she also directed the autobiographical performance The Rainbow Cinema and received the Best Amsterdam Fringe 2023 Award.

La Reprise is an ongoing exercise begun on April 21, 2013. Every week, a subsequent minute is produced consisting of scenes shot that week along with archival material from the past years. Footage and sound are consistently recorded with the same single device. 
The film may distort, but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is what was recorded. 
The sequences are neither true nor false, they integrate various degrees of theatricality and authenticity. They become portraits of an agitated immersion in the perpetual process of systematic indexing and gathering, and of close observations. [I am a passenger, a witness to recurrences and patterns.] This continuous collage of archives is the tension. The narrative is disconnected from the sum of its parts, and elaborates on successes and failures. Each screening becomes a unique occasion to view the film as the succession of each 1min weekly film is added every time.

At the beginning of the work, there is writing - perhaps a story, then there are photographs, films, and installations. Fette Sans was born in France. She lived in Los Angeles for about ten years where she ran an artist space, then moved to Berlin in 2010. Her work aims at questioning authenticity and the precious. What is representation without narrative? What is the role of light in memory? Panic. Repeat. Overwhelm. Serendipity plays an important role in her interaction with the characters and materials she gathers. She collects and re-interprets, referencing previous gestures and leaving these traces available for more examinations.

La Reprise (Dérive) is an exercise in continuity and distortion. This experimental film began on June 20, 2020. As of September 3, 2023, it is 168 min / weeks long. Every week, a subsequent minute is produced by combining scenes shot that week with archival material from the past years. Footage and sound are consistently recorded with the same single device (an iPhone). The film may distort, but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is what was recorded. The sequences are neither true nor false, they integrate various degrees of theatricality and authenticity. They become portraits of an agitated immersion in the perpetual process of being, of this unpredictable yet systematic gathering and indexing. They are the record of close observations. I am a passenger, a witness to recurrences and patterns. This continuous collage of archives is the tension. The narrative is disconnected from the sum of its parts and elaborates on successes and failures. In this regard, the film is in a constant state of being finished, rather than interminably in progress. While its length progressively evolves, it also always is its final duration. This work is meant to continue until my death.

Fette Sans is based in Zagreb and in Berlin. She has a conceptual and interdisciplinary practice that includes the production of images, writing, performances, online gestures, film-making, discussions, and installations. Games of dissociative identities and the stories we tell ourselves to collect evidence of what has happened are recurring components in her work. She is interested in the ambiguity of what constitutes an image’s residue. Concerned with social systems, representation, and technology, she develops obsessive rituals, collaborations, and speculative narratives to question these issues. Rituals are interesting because there are ways of expressing repetition and the longing for security while accepting the risks associated with the very act of ceremonial reiterations: boredom itself.

An ape metamorphoses into an Angel of Melancholy and leaves his island for Saturn, the sombre planet.

Gabriel Sanson, born in Paris in 1993, has directed several shorts, that premiered at the Biennale of Venice.

During February 2010, Jerusalem born artists Oreet Ashery and Larissa Sansour had twenty meals in twenty falafel eateries in London, one on each day. The meals were open for the public to join in eating and debate, and functioned as art events, laboratories, performances, therapy sessions and oral history hubs. All the meals were filmed with a small Flip camera on a rotating cheeseboard and were edited together into one-hour of raw and immediate film. Ashery and Sansour opened each meal with the question: Did Israel steal the falafel from the Palestinians? This seemingly silly and controversial question, was a precursor to an investigation into the intentional and systematic hijacking and eradication of Palestinian cultural history by the state of Israel.

Oreet Ashery is a Jerusalem born, London based visual artist, cultural activist and educationist, engaged in solo and collaborative practices. Ashery works across performance, still and moving image, objects and facilitation to create situations that explore the relationships between politics, culture and representation. Ashery?s work is presented extensively in an international context, and discussed in numerous publications and books, in various languages. Recently Ashery had published three books: The Novel of Nonel and Vovel, with the artist Larissa Sansour, Charta; the monograph Dancing with Men, Live Art Development Agency; and the Artangel commission Staying, dream, bin, soft stud and other stories. Sansour?s work is interdisciplinary and borrows heavily from the language of film and pop culture. References and details ranging from sci-fi and spaghetti westerns to horror films converge with Middle East politics and social issues to create intricate parallel universes in which a new value system can be decoded. Sansour?s work has been exhibited worldwide in international biennials, galleries, museums, film festivals and on the internet and is featured in many art publications. Larissa Sansour was born in Jerusalem and lives and works in London, UK.

Happy Days is a video that exposes everyday Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. In the video, a collage of footage shot on location in the occupied territories is accompanied by the theme music from the seventies sitcom ?Happy Days?. The piece provides imagery different from that of news footage. The contrasting music underlines the general public?s apathy when confronted with world conflict. The idea is to subjugate international politics to a format normally associated with entertainment and thereby call attention to the blurry boundary between the two.

Born 1973 in Jerusalem, Sansour studied Fine Art in Copenhagen, London and New York, and earned her MFA from New York University. Her work is interdisciplinary, immersed in the current political dialogue and utilizes video art, digital photography, experimental documentary and the internet. Sansour?s work has been exhibited worldwide in galleries, museums as well as film festivals. Her most notable shows include the Tate Modern in London, UK, the National Museum of Queen Sofia in Madrid, Spain and an upcoming show at Arken Musem of Modern Art in Denmark. Sansour is an International board member at the new concept school Chaos Pilots where she contributes with her writing on arts, politics and education. She lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark.

In Vitro is set in the aftermath of an eco-disaster. An abandoned nuclear reactor under the biblical town of Bethlehem has been converted into an enormous orchard. Using heirloom seeds collected in the final days before the apocalypse, a group of scientists are preparing to replant the soil above. In the hospital wing of the underground compound, the orchard’s ailing founder, 70-year-old Dunia is lying in her deathbed, as 30-year-old Alia comes to visit her. Alia is born underground as part of a comprehensive cloning program and has never seen the town she’s destined to rebuild.

Larissa Sansour Larissa Sansour is a Palestinian artist/director. Central to her work is the tug and pull between fiction and reality. In her recent works, she uses science fiction to address social and political issues. Working mainly with film, Sansour also produces installations, photos and sculptures. Sansour’s work is shown in film festivals and museums worldwide. In 2019, she represents Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennial. She has shown her work at Tate Modern, MoMA, Centre Pompidou and the Istanbul Biennial as well as the Berlinale, Rotterdam International Film Festival and BFI London Film Festival. Recent solo exhibitions include Bluecoat in Liverpool, Dar El-Nimer in Beirut and Nikolaj Kunsthal in Copenhagen. Sansour lives and works in London. Søren Lind Soren Lind (b. 1970) is a Danish author, director and scriptwriter. With a background in philosophy, Lind wrote books on mind, language and understanding before turning to film and fiction. He has published novels, shorts story collections and several children’s books. Lind screens and exhibits his films at museums, galleries and film festivals worldwide. Recent venues and festivals include the 58th Venice Biennial, MoMA (US), Barbican (UK), Nikolaj Kunsthal (DK), Berlinale (D), International Film Festival Rotterdam (NL) and BFI London Film Festival (UK). He lives and works in London.