North American Premiere
A startling confrontation with a photograph taken in Gaza, in December 2023 (which now exists on social media), triggers questions about what it means to be an onlooker. Focusing on pixilated details, the incoherent forms begin to take shape, while the human and un-human implications of this scene reveal a historical context that cannot be unseen. Accomplice, accessory, abettor. Does the passive or active observer play a role in these transgressions?
Community Partner
UK
2024
English
Graphic violence
Indigenous & Community Access
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Credits & Director
Screenwriter
Miranda Pennell
Editor
Miranda Pennell
Miranda Pennell
Miranda Pennell is a London-based filmmaker whose work often recycles images from British colonial archives to reflect on contemporary situations. Her films emphasise the role of the imagination in the interpretation of historical documents,
recently drawing on genre-fiction as a way of engaging with troubled histories.
Pennell received an MA in visual anthropology in 2010 from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and she completed her PhD research at the University of Westminster in 2016.
Her films have screened at Viennale, Rotterdam International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, FID Marseille, London International Film Festival and among others.
Recent selected group exhibitions include Evil Eye: The Parralel Histories of Optics and Ballistics (2023) Tabakalera, San Sebastian; The Light Becomes The Eye (2023), EUCA Annex, London.
Missing VIFF? Check Out What's Playing at the VIFF Centre
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The Secret in Their Eyes
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The Haunting
Directed by Robert Wise in 1963, The Haunting is a classic exercise in the suggestive power of cinema, adapted from Shirley Jackson's 1959 best-seller, The Haunting of Hill House, a provocative blend of supernatural and psychological horror.
