Zap-O-Matik

Director Johan Grimonprez casts Alfred Hitchcock as a paranoid history professor, unwittingly caught up in a double take on the cold war period. Subverting a meticulous array of TV footage and using 'The Birds' as an essential metaphor, DOUBLE TAKE traces catastrophe culture's relentless assault on the home, from moving images' inception to the present day.

Obsessed with de/reconstructing our corrupted visions of media, celebrity and appearance, Johan Grimonprez assembled a bewildering gaggle of Hitchcock lookalikes, staggering in girth and exacting in attitude, in a quest to find the most accurate specimen.

Jazz and decolonization are intertwined in a powerful narrative that recounts one of the tensest episodes of the Cold War.

In 1980 an extraordinary demonstration hit the streets of the Brazilian city of Sorocaba. Under the military dictatorship, a court had outlawed kisses that undermined public morals. The ruling by Judge Manuel Moralles, which punished such kisses with jail terms, described them this way: “some kisses are libidinous and therefore obscene, like a kiss on the neck, on the private parts, etc., and like the cinematographic kiss in which the labial mucosa come together in an unsophismable expansion of sensuality.” The city responded by becoming one huge kissodrome. Never had people kissed so much. Prohibition sparked desire and many were those who out of simple curiosity wanted a taste of the unsophismable kiss.

A detailed investigation into the political and economic interests that, since the beginning of the 20th century, have pulled the strings of the arms trade, hidden in the shadows, feeding the shameful corruption of politicians and government officials and promoting a state of permanent war throughout the world, while they cynically asked for a lasting and universal peace.

When asked a question on politics, late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once answered: “I write about love to expose the conditions that don’t allow me to write about love.” In TWO TRAVELERS TO A RIVER Palestinian actress Manal Khader recites such a poem by Mahmoud Darwish: a concise reflection on how things could have been.

In Blue Orchids, Johan Grimonprez creates a double portrait of two experts situated on opposite ends of the same issue—the global arms trade. The stories of Chris Hedges, a former New York Times war correspondent, and Riccardo Privitera, arms and equipment dealer for the now-defunct Talisman Europe Ltd, provide an unusual and disturbing context for shocking revelations about the industry of war. While interviewing Privitera and Hedges for Grimonprez’s recently released feature Shadow World (2016), it became clear that the two men were describing the same anguish and trauma, but from paradoxical perspectives. One has dedicated his life to unmasking lies, while the other has built his life on them. Both their personal and political histories gradually reveal the depths of suffering and duplicity, showing that the arms trade is a symptom of a profound illness: greed.

In January 1999, at the height of the Lewinsky-Clinton affair, Herman Asselberghs and Dieter Lesage asked me if I would be in for a trip to Lost Nation. They explained this was part of a project they were setting up in Brussels: a place slash library slash installation about vanished nations such as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, East and West Germany, USSR, and Zaire. But where was Lost Nation? Browsing through their library, Herman and Dieter stumbled onto Lost Nation, an American village located on Highway 136 in Eastern Iowa, with a community of 497 citizens. And so, this little road movie was the result. A trip to a nation where the average citizen spends about 5 years of his lifetime waiting in line, 2 years trying to reach people by telephone, 1 year searching for misplaced objects, 8 months opening junk-mail and 6 months sitting at traffic lights. A nation that attempted to impeach the wrong president.