Sixteen by Nine

Sixteen by Nine, 2016. Color, digital video, 18 minutes.

Our film is an assemblage, unified and inspired by a perspective of global citizenship. The first part constructs a precarious view of the human condition. An interview becomes an optical illusion, shown through a filter—the undulating surface of dirty water, and unsynchronized audio—the convention of interview becomes a performance, bringing truth itself into question. The film utilizes the phenomenology of science and nature in modern culture to efface the boundaries between the physical and political, which works to place human lives in a spectrum of value. The second part features footage from an archival document. By again repurposing Hadi’s video footage in “Sixteen by Nine,” the notoriety and hateful stigma that has ushered it into its archival disposition, now function iconically, when juxtaposed with imagery of mourning from many different perspectives, often politically oppositional. Our film utilizes propaganda techniques to bring viewers into a position of grieving for those who are famously appointed ungrievable, and closes with a montage which may give some viewers a perspective of a world that is jarring in its universality and humanistic compassion.