What can cinema still do when the ubiquitous image has lost its capacity to disturb? What can be done when the bond between image and action appears to have been severed? Doc’s Kingdom 2026 takes these questions as its starting point for a wider reflection on the conditions under which images are made, circulated and received in times of accelerated dispossession and genocidal brutality.
And so the program draws on the work of filmmakers engaged with revolutionary imagination and the historic images that were once thought to carry it, and the collective and common forms that were never any single person or entity’s property, holding the opacity of the image as a political claim. Together, their films conjure five centuries of Mesoamerican resistance to colonial violence, the Palestinian liberation movement, and the aftermath of utopian experiments in ex-Yugoslavia, postwar Lebanon and rural Portugal. What connects them is less a theme than shared undercurrents: the refusal of thinking the image as just an evidentiary document; the embrace of memory through the work of collective disorientation; and the creation of visual and sonic trances capable of reactivating a sensibility numbed by algorithmic spells.
These works resist translation into the dominant audiovisual grammar, and ask of their viewers something the current image economy actively discourages: to wager counterspells that can jolt our bodies into movements.
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Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco (1990, Veracruz, Mexico) is a visual artist and filmmaker whose films and installations explore the human body and portraiture as mirrors of different states of being, spanning the personal, social, and political. She has a particular interest in analog and handmade film as a medium for capturing the poetics of light, materiality, and the moving image. Her first feature film, “Aoquic iez in Mexico! Mexico will no longer exist!” was released in 2024.
Quagliata Blanco grew up in Mexico City and has lived in Taiwan, New York, and Boston, where she was a graduate of Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Quagliata Blanco currently lives and works in Mexico City.
Camilo Restrepo (1975, Medellín, Colombia) makes films at the crossroads of documentary, performance and experimental cinema.
Through the use of a minimalist style and artisanal craftsmanship, Restrepo’s formal choices and production methods resonate with the themes explored in his filmography: protagonists embody forms of resistance against the dominant society. Working primarily in 16mm, Restrepo handles most stages of production himself: shooting, developing negatives and editing. To date, Restrepo’s filmography comprises eight shorts and two feature films.
He is a member of the L’Abominable collective, which operates as an independent film production lab specializing in celluloid-based production and film development. A 2004 graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, Restrepo has lived in France since 1999.
José Álvaro Morais (1943-2004) was a Portuguese director and writer, working between docufiction and fiction. Often resorting to humor and irony, Morais’ films reflected both on history and myth, playfully thematizing callings such as that of the “South”, and on changes in Portuguese society since the Carnation Revolution. Álvaro Morais is known for films such as O Bobo (1987), Zéfiro (1993), Peixe-Lua (2000) and Quaresma (2003).
Marta Popivoda (Berlin/Belgrade) is a filmmaker, artist, and researcher. Her work explores tensions between memory, history, and ideology, as well as the relations between collective and individual bodies. She approaches them from a feminist and queer perspective and cherishes collective practice in art-making and research. For twenty years, she was part of the TkH (Walking Theory) collective. In her recent work, Popivoda uses landscape dramaturgy, feminist storytelling, and radical slowness to produce scenes of antifascist and eco-feminist memory. She teaches film at the University of the Arts in Amsterdam and is a member of the European Film Academy.
Mohamed Soueid (Beirut, 1959) is a Lebanese writer, director and producer and a pioneer of non-narrative, non-fiction cinema in post-war Lebanon. He directed his first film “Absence” (Ghiyab) in 1990, and soon after joined the team of TéléLiban, Lebanon’s main public television channel, where directed documentaries, dramatic series and short experimental clips, including “Cinema Fouad” (1993), “Destinée” (1996) and “Being Camilia.” He began working on his poetic, raspy autobiography trilogy, “Tango of Yearning” (Tango al-Amal, 1998), “Nightfall” (‘Indama Ya’ti al-Masa’, 2000), and “Civil War” (Harb Ahliyyah, 2002) while he was still at TéléLiban.
As a film critic, novelist, and dramaturge he has authored several books about Lebanese and Arab cinema, including “A Postponed Cinema: Lebanese Civil War Films” (Beirut: Institute of Arab Researches, 1986), “Oh My Heart; A History of Movie Theaters in Old Beirut” (Beirut: An-Nahar, 1996) and published a novel titled “Cabaret Souad“ (Dar al-Adab, 2004).
Through a diverse body of work in film, photography, and text, Oraib Toukan (1977, Boston) explores alternative, native, and vernacular understandings of images, often drawing from the Arabic language. Until 2019, she was a Clarendon fellow at Oxford University, Ruskin School of Art where she completed her PhD. She currently teaches at the MFA program of Bard College, New York, and was a research-based fellow in artistic practice at EUME, Berlin until 2026 as well as the Harun Farocki Institute. She is author of the books Sundry Modernism: Materials for a Study of Palestinian Modernism (Sternberg Press, 2017) and Things Bigger Than What Can Be Seen (Archive Books, 2026).
Sílvia das Fadas (born Sílvia Salgueiro) is an artist-filmmaker, and a convivial researcher based in the South of Portugal. She is interested in the politics intrinsic to cinematic practices and in cinema as a way of being together in restlessness and brokenness. Her artistic practice involves research, texts, 16mm films, curating and alternative pedagogies, summoning detours and metamorphosis from the utopian margins.