Immerse yourself in the literature of your life

~ Upcoming Marquee Event ~

Afterlives is a desktop documentary that critically engages with the historical and digital traces of extremist propaganda, questioning how images of violence circulate, mutate, and persist. The film moves between virtual investigations and real-world encounters with artists, activists, and researchers who seek to resist the toxic effects of such media. At its core is the figure of Medusa—a victim of violence whose gaze turned viewers to stone—invoked as a symbol of both the dangers and transformative potential of looking. From museum archives to AI-generated reconstructions, the film explores how power structures, spanning from the colonial past to the digital age, shape the way we see and remember violence. Can we ever truly look without being complicit? And is there another way to care?

This screening will be followed by a Q&A with Kevin B. Lee and two passionate admirers of his artistic endeavors since their early theatrical collaborations at Williams College, Paul Ham & Grant Koo.

Read Grant’s gonzo review in The JZJ, but also what other admittedly more established critics are praising about the film:

• BFI London Review: Kevin B. Lee’s Debut Feature Afterlives Interrogates Terrorist Propaganda | Savina Petkova | The Film Stage (https://thefilmstage.com/bfi-london-review-kevin-b-lees-debut-feature-afterlives-interrogates-terrorist-propaganda/)
  “(…) Afterlives is a dedicated, reflective documentary, the bell of its urgency ringing far into the futures of images.”
• Critique: Afterlives | David Katz | Cineuropa  (https://cineuropa.org/fr/newsdetail/485073/)
  “(…) Visceral and straightforwardly emotional… with eerie formal poetry in copious quantities.”
• Notes from London Film Festival (III.) | Joel Whitaker | Cinema Year Zero (https://www.cinemayearzero.com/p/notes-from-london-film-festival-iii?utm_source=publication-search)
  “Lee has been far ahead of the curve for years in terms of how documentaries can streamline the conveyance of information, this film feels like a natural development of his style and voice.”
• AFTERLIVES | Giuseppe Di Salvatore | Filmexplorer (https://www.filmexplorer.ch/detail/afterlives/)
  “(…) Afterlives is a kick-off film, as a starting point of a critical discussion that needs to be continued, as a temporary cinema crystallization that deconstructs the dynamic of spectacle in order to open up a restless, filmic territory where affective intelligence reactivates media theory.”