Rob Schröder
This rich essay searches for new ways of being together in the age of social media. We arrange our lives to impress the gaze of others and have become accustomed to being seen. For many young people, however, the party is over. Neoliberalism has made murderous competition the norm; and in the meantime, the planet is dying. Following the unmasking of Facebook’s real motives, more and more people are deleting their Facebook accounts – but this often results in social death. The first image in POSSESSED sets the tone: liquefied lead runs over burning smartphones, followed by images of a devastated neighbourhood in Aleppo. Even the smartphones have not survived the attack. The chains of social media must be cast off, but the perpetual question remains: Who is looking out for you? Academics Alex Williams (University of East Anglia) and Nick Srnicek (King's College London) address this crucial question, along with other issues
Janie’s just trying to get well. As she recovers from a violent psychotic break, she’s subjected each day to a bizarre holistic health and wellness regimen designed, and enforced, by her lifelong nanny and caretaker. But when she develops an obsession with a stranger, Janie's buried demons begin to surface.
A documentary about the intersecting worlds of art, pop-culture, sex, and business in the Middle East after the Egyptian revolution. It follows Dutch-Egyptian conceptual artist Tarik Sadouma and Jordanian pop singer Malak al-Naser as they travel to Cairo, Beirut and Dubai.
Sisters doing it for themselves in Amsterdam's Red Light District. Louise and Martine Fokkens are identical twins. For over fifty years they were working as prostitutes. They freed themselves from the control of their pimps, ran their own brothel, and set up the first informal trade union for prostitutes. They are familiar faces in Amsterdam's Red Light District, but soon they will bid their farewells. The Ladies Fokkens is a portrait of these remarkable women, as well as a history of the Red Light District over the past fifty years.
Rapidly expanding megacities are a global phenomenon and as a consequence millions of people today live in makeshift constructs they call their homes. Venezuela is Latin America’s most urbanized country, and in the capital Caracas ”informal” cities grow at a dangerous speed up along the ridges of the city. High crime rates and bad sanitary conditions are only some of the problems here. These problems are seen from the point of view of architects and designers in this documentary, which shows inspirational examples of possibilities born when when visions meet reality. The film documents parts of the experimental project called Urban Think Tank, which has substituted drawing board studies with creating solutions in dialogue with the street level. ”In future city planning one has to free oneself from the toolbox of the past” is the architects’ answer to the issues of urbanisation.
Dutch filmmakers gathered to make this compilation movie, consisting of 17 segments, as a reaction to the status quo in The Netherlands after the assassination of filmmaker Theo van Gogh on november 2, 2004.
About the art explosion in Amsterdam during the 1980's when artists of all sorts found spaces and places and the legendary club RoXY (1987-1999) was created.
One of the most interesting shows ever aired on public television was Wim Kayzer's interviews with six leading intellectuals who represented both the mainstream academic (Stephen J. Gould, Freeman Dyson and Stephen Toulmin) and more or less, as it were, "eccentric" outside the box groundbreaking intellectuals (Oliver Sacks and Rupert Sheldrake). Kayzer interviews each of them (and philosopher Daniel Dennett) individually and then has the entire group sit in a kind of round-table seminar that he moderates and lets the ideas fly.
After his car breaks down, Glen spends one hell of an odd night with a married couple, setting into motion a chain of events that alter their lives plus those of several random strangers.
