Watching the Pain of Others

In this deeply personal video diary, a young researcher tries to make sense of her fascination for the film "The Pain of Others" by Penny Lane. A deep dive into the discomforting world of YouTube and online conspiracies, that challenges traditional notions of what documentary cinema is, or should be.

Bottled Songs: The Observer

A researcher finds a phone video showing hundreds of ISIS captives running through a desert. She is puzzled that the video is posted on YouTube by Les Observateurs, a French state-funded news channel as a work of “citizen journalism”. While the video has been removed from many other channels, the French news channel’s legitimacy allows the video to remain online and spread terror over several years. Further investigation uncovers multiple variants of the footage on countless other sites, leading her to despair.