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
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
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 Her films emphasise the role of the imagination in the interpretation of historical documents,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
NAZA
NAZA is a codeword euphemistically used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians it expects will be killed in an airstrike. This chilling documentary exposes the policy and process of state-sanctioned mass killings.
Atonement
A former Marine suffering from PTSD seeks a meeting with the Iraqi family to which he did great wrong ten years earlier in the Gulf War. Atonement navigates challenging, politically-charged psychological territory with diligence and sensitivity.
The Sandbox
Borders are the faultlines of the world. Kenya-Jade Pinto's doc examines how modern surveillance technology, bio-metrics and AI are combining to make land and sea borders as impenetrable as air travel, and suggests the unspoken cost is our own humanity.
The Pervert's Guide to Ideology
Slavoj Zizek re-teams with director Sophie Fiennes for another wildly entertaining romp through the crossroads of cinema and philosophy. From The Sound of Music to Titanic, Jaws to The Dark Knight, Zizek offers new ways to understanding Hollywood.
The Pervert's Guide to Cinema
The Pervert's Guide to Cinema takes the viewer on an exhilarating ride through some of the greatest movies ever made (Hitchcock, Lynch, Tarkovsky et al). Serving as guide is Slavoj Zizek, the superstar Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst.
You Had to Be There
In a strange quirk of fate, the legendary Toronto '72 production of the musical comedy Jesus hit Godspell launched a constellation of comedy stars, all unknown at the time but now known to us as Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, Victor Garber, et al