With the profusion of user-shared digital news and the concurrent rise of right-wing media outlets, biases, gaps, and incomplete narratives are becoming increasingly intrinsic to our news. Misinformation, reporting, and narratives are met with instantaneous reactions, shaping dynamic political grounds.

In their films, Frank Sweeney and the duo Monica Basbous & Charbel Alkhoury explore how these fragmentary commons, these political grounds, impact notions of collectivity and collective imaginaries amid direct censorship, ambiguous narratives, and rewritten histories. In Few Can See, Frank Sweeney recreates news material absent from state archives due to censorship around the conflict in the north of Ireland. He fills these omissions and gaps by reenacting oral interviews with people living through these politics. Monica Basbous & Charbel Alkhoury’s Popg Clanc documents how a WhatsApp group of PUBG gamers shapeshifted into a revolutionary cell, an information verification system, and more during the popular uprisings – and the subsequent financial and infrastructural collapses – of Lebanon in 2019.

Supported by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg.