Movies: Johan Grimonprez

In 1960, United Nations: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe denouncing America’s color bar, while the U.S. dispatches jazz ambassador Lou...

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 official...

In 1515 Machiavelli stated that it is better for the Prince to be feared than loved. Some 500 years later, Michael Hardt, political philosopher and co-author of Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth, asks what it would mean to base a political system on...

In Three Thoughts on Terror, investigative journalists Robert Fisk, Jeremy Scahill and Vijay Prashad approach the concept of terror from their respective angles....

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 ...

An acclaimed hijacking documentary that eerily foreshadowed 9/11. We meet the romantic skyjackers who fought their revolutions and won airtime on the passenger planes of the 1960s and '70s. By the 1990s, such characters were apparently no more, repla...

An anthropologist, who tries to decode corporate culture, gets obsessed with the story of a parachutist who died after his equipment malfunctioned. In the parachutist's finitude - caught in an ultimate meditative moment of plunging to an approaching ...

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 t...

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 equ...

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 spec...

"I painted the worlds entering the eyes." In her day, painter and portraitist Sofonisba Anguissola was much celebrated. In this sumptuous animation, she is rescued from the realm of obscurity and given new life in an epistolary missive to her pupil, ...

Dozens of couples dance in a circle, a house topples down a slope, a cat manically revolves around itself. A few seconds beforehand, an admonishing voice points out that a centuries-old philosophical assumption is under close scrutiny. It is René Des...

During the making of Double Take, professional Hitchcock doppelgänger Ron Burrage pointed director Johan Grimonprez to a story doing the rounds online: supposedly, the Master of Suspense didn’t have a belly button. This captured the imagination of Gr...

In this video Vromman shows us virtuoso how a “plan séquence” is capable of exploring a given spatial arrangement notably an abandoned church in Ghent. It is as though the camera possesses a will of its own, or, more appropriately, as it became itsel...

Kobarweng reconstructs the first encounter between a remote village set in the highlands of the island of New Guinea and the outside world. Mainly told through a native narrative, it reclaims the memory of a colonial past. Switching the roles of obse...

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...