Herman Asselberghs is currently working on a long-term film project at the film department of the LUCA School of Arts, where he has been teaching for two decades. Through the realization of a film essay, he probes the relationship between attention and distraction in the film theatre and the classroom. Throughout the creation process, Sabzian reports on his accompanying reading and writing. On a regular basis, Asselberghs selects an existing text that interests him and that he himself provides with an accompanying text. In the first instalment he focuses on Leaving the Movie Theater [En sortant du cinéma] by Roland Barthes.

Still, upon sauntering through the large and wide-ranging selection of pictures large and small, framed and unframed, hung high and low, or spread out on tables, I started to perceive Wolfgang Tillman’s show, 2017, as equally marking this moment in time, when high resolution camera phones have become completely ubiquitous.

So this film about a charged political moment remains strangely, and deliberately, disconnected from the politics of that moment. What interests Loznitsa isn’t the politics of the protests, or their political ramifications; what he focuses on and brings to the screen is the dramatic arc of protests as such.