Afterlives

Official Selection, 2026 Prismatic Ground
Official Selection, 2026 DMZ International Documentary Film Festival

In 2014, ISIS released an extremist propaganda film titled “Flames of War,” which was then noted for its aesthetic kinship with the Hollywood blockbuster. In 2021, at a museum exhibit on “images of extremism and political violence” which included his work, noted video essayist and critic Kevin B. Lee became obsessed with an encased sculpture of a Medusa head. Under its chin, a mysterious cord leads to a hard drive, which the viewer can access. In it contained video footage of ISIS’ destruction of ancient cultural artifacts.

Unlocking the hard drive, Lee uncovers the artists’ digital reconstruction of these artifacts and her eventual reflections on the project when it is appropriated by others for Islamophobic purposes. As Lee becomes interested in other counterstrategies, including an online youth-protection expert and a counterterrorism researcher, what follows is a fascinating odyssey that examines the proliferation of extremist content and the mental, political, and spiritual toll of witnessing and metabolizing it. What happens when we see a video of a beheading, or a propaganda film intended to radicalize someone to become the beheader? How does the virality of extremist content become instrumentalized by Western media to justify continued military intervention in the Middle East, and how can we break free from its never-ending cycle of violence? What happens when these images become such a normal feature of everyday life as to become furniture, background noise?

Visualized almost entirely on a desktop, AFTERLIVES probes the fraught relationship between the digital realm and the real world—the sinister ways in which a screen can at once generate violence and make that same violence appear unreal.

– Justin Nguyen