75005 Paris
Screening followed by a discussion with director Ruba Al-Sweel.
What is it like to experience living through climate change and geopolitical unrest from the specific vantage point of the screen? Of platform capitalism and algorithms? As NPCs during epoch-making events, how do we make sense out of the apophenic experience of scrolling?
Across docufiction, video-essay and speculative media, the films ventriloquize the machine, tracing the movement of people, things and ideas across precarious value chains as a way of understanding how the world works. Moscow Hotel is Sick of Your Tears observes the migration of the sacred onto platforms — from 9th-century Sabian talismans to TikTok divinatory filters, the sky has yielded to the screen and algorithmic feeds now function as constellations one consults to seek advice, demand justice, curse or heal. First Phone then summons an NPC animated by an AI egregore, observing climate collapse and geopolitical violence as background noise within the data stream. Finally, Plastic Pilgrims takes this logic to its conclusion: a stolen, resold and repaired phone narrates its long journey in the first person, circulating between Shenzhen’s electronics architectures, second-hand markets, repair workshops, smuggling networks and streaming platforms. The experience of these films is no longer that of a human gaze but of a swarming vision across platforms and machines, less a matter of linear narrative than a nervous — even neurotic — state.
Screening programmed and presented by Pétronille Malet
