Is It (For) Real? Image-Document Adventures in Experimental Cinema

As part of the Fête du court-métrage 2026, the nonprofit organization Des courts l’après-midi has invited Light Cone to curate and present a guest program featuring a selection of films from its catalogue. The screening will take place at Videodrome 2 in Marseille.

This program brings together experimental films from Light Cone’s collection that address the question of the real, in particular the devastating real of war (economic, colonial, imperial, nuclear, and revolutionary), through the reappropriation of image-documents of diverse nature and origin: found amateur videos, news footage, film excerpts, and photographs drawn from archives—a multitude of visual sources that become matter to be manipulated by filmmaker-analysts who scrutinize them and subject them to radical transformations, both formally and at the level of meaning. Certain war motifs, such as aerial views and the spectacle of explosions, inevitably recur from film to film, while the filmmakers, not without wit and sometimes, even, with a good dose of humor in the face of tragedy, trace paths of subjective appropriation and subversive storytelling through voice, text, editing, and music.

Featuring works by Viktoria Schmid, Luc Meichler & Gisèle Rapp-Meichler, Jan Peters, Kamal Aljafari, Miranda Pennell, and Jean Gabriel Périot.

Screening introduced by Eleni Gioti and followed by a discussion.

* Still image: Miranda Pennell’s Strange Object (2020).

More info: https://lightcone.org/en/news-952-is-it-for-real-carte-blanche-light-cone-a-marseille