Johan Grimonprez

An acclaimed experimental documentary tracing the history of airplane hijacking as portrayed by mainstream television media. Official Selection at the **International Film Festival Rotterdam** and **Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival**.

In this short film, British neurologist Raymond Tallis argues that consciousness is not an internal construct, but rather relational. Through the intriguing notion that humans are physically unable to tickle themselves, Tallis explores the philosophical notion that we become ourselves only through dialogue with others. Shouldn't Descartes' first tenet "I think, therefore I am" rather be: we dialogue, therefore we are? A view underscored by the observation...

BLUE ORCHIDS creates a double portrait of two experts situated on opposite ends of the same issue--the global arms trade. The stories of Chris Hedges, the former war correspondent of The New York Times, and Riccardo Privitera, a former arms & equipment dealer of Talisman Europe Ltd (now dissolved), provide an unusual and disturbing context for shocking revelations about the industry of war. While interviewing Privitera and Hedges for director Johan...

Investigative journalists Robert Fisk, Jeremy Scahill and Vijay Prashad approach the concept of terror from their respective angles. Fisk dismantles terror as a term that is rendered meaningless to alienate political movement from its origins: justice and injustice. Scahill points out that terror is a relative term, as its interpretation depends on which side of the bombing you're on. Using the absurd example of the 'The Hague Invasion Act', he shows...

Johan Grimonprez's ingenious documentary/ fiction hybrid - a meditation on identity, filmmaking, power and paranoia - looks at Alfred Hitchcock's 50s-60s films against the climate of Cold War anxiety. Using a meticulous array of archive footage and a story by novelist Tom McCarthy, Grimonprez traces the global rise of fear as a commodity, examining modern history through the lens of mass media.

This short film weaves an unexpected narrative from Hitchcock's trail of walk-on parts, in which the master himself is pursued by a number of shadowy doppelgängers, caught up in a world of mistaken identity. Playing out a multi-leveled 'reality', Grimonprez's cinematic twists and turns echo the trademark of the Master of Suspense, while radiating a quiet and beguiling surrealism reminiscent of that other great master, Rene Magritte.