During ACAB Kino’s residency at Pilar, we research the widening divide between security and care: how, in a climate of rising fascism, "security" is increasingly funded and legitimised while care infrastructures (healthcare, education, social welfare) are stripped away. We want to unpack this tactic, untangling safety, security and control, and tracing it as a recurring political pattern. Each screening, we will dive into a subtopic. 

Images of war circulate in our daily life. War images produced by news journalists or citizen journalists appears every few videos as we scroll through social media, sitting side-by-side with product reviews, “GRWM” videos, "a day in my life" content, or meme compilations about social phenomena, depending on where the algorithmic regime directs our attention. For viewers who are watching safely from the other side of the world, what appears on screen is a visual representation of unfolding violence; a simulation of reality. Whereas for the colonized and behind the lens, it is their everyday life. This boundary between simulation and reality is evident in Les enfants de la guerre, a film by Jocelyn Saab that frames children playing on a battlefield. As we delve deeper into the film, the line between reality and simulation blurs: the children at play are juxtaposed against the stark reality that they are not actually playing.

Seeing war images from afar through the realm of representation and simulation (or the internet) montaged with everyday contents, puts us at risk of becoming numb and losing empathy. In Harun Farocki’s 2003 film War At a Distance, we can observe repetitive synthetic images of war from the perspective of the dominant power systems. We see how “the eye of the machine” erases the human element from the war zone, allowing the soldiers, who control the machine to shed their empathy, thereby easily looking past the human lives on the screen. By watching these films parallels with how spectators intensely consume war images, we can reflect on how images, empathy, and militarism are intertwined. 

Today, we can watch war from afar, even in real time. This screening program seeks to dissect the visual representations of military violence we consume and relate them to our daily lives. We invite Anggraeni Widhiasih, a researcher, artist, and curator from Indonesia. Her practice explores the intersections of memory, media, archives, and digital culture, focusing on how historical narratives are produced, contested, and circulated through film and social media. Anggra will do an intervention that can help us analyze these two films from the perspectives of cinema and media literacy.

Film program:

Jocelyne Saab, Les enfants de la guerre (1976, 11')

Harun Farocki, War at a Distance (2003, 58')

Monday 26 October
18:30: Dinner
 19:30: Film screening
20:45: Intervention by Anggraeni Widhiasih 

Ticket sale at the door (PWYC with €5 suggestion price), but please make a reservation for dinner in advance.