Johan Grimonprez Movies

Jazz and decolonization are intertwined in a powerful narrative that recounts one of the tensest episodes of the Cold War. In 1960, the UN became the stage for a political earthquake as the struggle for independence in the Congo put the world on high alert. The newly independent nation faced its...

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 officials and promoting a state of permanent war...

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 equipment dealer for the now-defunct Talisman...

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 traces catastrophe culture's relentless assault on...

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

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, replaced on our TV screens by stories of anonymous...

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 specimen.

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 a poem by Mahmoud Darwish: a concise...

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 observer and observed, it is anthropology-and...

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 love, rather than on fear. How can we transform...

The result of a workshop for which Franciska Lambrechts supplied a varied company of individuals and some basic equipment: a super-8 camera with 3 B/W films. What we see is a creative montage wherein the workshop and the discussed topics itself are at the core.

Johan Grimonprez transposes an extract from Meg Stuart’s compelling choreography ‘No Longer Ready-Made’ to the anonymous waiting room of a railway station. This colourless space along with nameless travellers provides the excellent setting for Stuart’s hectic and intense convulsions. A...

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 slash installation about vanished nations such...

"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, Flemish master Anthony Van Dyck.

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 death - the anthropologist sees a sudden and...

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 itself a dancer within the given space. The...

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 Descartes’ first tenet, »I think, therefore I...

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 Grimonprez, as it implied that Hitchcock had not...