Re-enacting the Future

In this deeply personal video diary, a young researcher tries to make sense of her fascination for the film "The Pain of Others" by Penny Lane. A deep dive into the discomforting world of YouTube and online conspiracies, that challenges traditional notions of what documentary cinema is, or should be.

Through desktop documentary and forensics, this work explores how images of Medusa of Hatra, ISIS propaganda, and digital archives influence reality and memory while examining violence and witness.

Video essay on the work of Jia Zhangke by Kevin B. Lee, specially commissioned by Eye Filmmuseum and IFFR as a response to the installation Close-Up.

Premiered at the 2017 Locarno International Film Festival.

‘Kevin’s piece on his childhood experiences with the film Platoon are an example of the very power of cinema to shape our relationship with the world, and the world’s relationship with us … an experience of childhood trauma so visceral, that I haven’t just gained new insight on the war epic itself.’ (Cidnii Wilde Harris)

This desktop investigation asks: how can one begin to learn about Farocki? Starting with a naive search for his name online, this film scans over his body of work and asks how one should begin to watch it. By using different methods to make sense of Farocki's images, a key concept emerges: the counter-image.

In this video I share my experience as the first Resident of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin during the winter of 2016-2017. Produced for the Goethe Institute.

The mind process behind the film, Transformers the Premake, explained by Kevin B Lee himself.

Five decades of Harun Farocki's film and video material are transformed into an audiovisual vocabulary, teaching key Farockian concepts from A to Z. This video essay takes inspiration from Farocki's lifelong fascination with the teaching functions of film and media. Commissioned by the Goethe-Institut, a leading German-language educator in the world.

Bottled Songs is an ongoing media project depicting strategies for making sense of online terrorist propaganda. Filmmakers and media researchers Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee compose letters addressed to each other, narrating their encounters with videos originating from the terrorist group the Islamic State (ISIS). They use a desktop documentary approach to trace and record their investigations playing directly upon their computer screens.

What can be learned from watching only the moments when an artist appears in his own work? Harun Farocki appears in 24 of his own films; his time on screen totals 2 hours and 21 minutes: enough to form a movie in itself. The footage reveals a remarkable, evolving relationship between a man and his own images.

How much can you see of a movie you can't see? A speculative video essay on the film READERS by James Benning.