Belgian filmmaker and multimedia artist Johan Grimonprez, who was nominated in 2025 at the Academy Awards for his documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, was the filmmaker in focus at the 19^th edition of the One World Romania International Documentary & Human Rights Film Festival in Bucharest (24^th to 29^th April, 2026). One of the most politically engaged filmmakers currently working, Johan Grimonprez attended the festival in Bucharest, where he talked with the audience after two screenings of his films, Shadow World (2016) and Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (2024), and also hosted a masterclass. On this occasion, I had the opportunity to interview the filmmaker and discuss his views on documentary and the world today.

Q: You studied cultural anthropology, fine arts, photography, video and mixed media in Belgium, the Netherlands, and the USA. Given this academic background, how did you become a documentary filmmaker?

A: For me, all these different fields inform both the storytelling and how I became a documentary filmmaker. Already from the very beginning, when I was in the mountains of Irian Jaya in 1986, doing fieldwork in West Papua for my university, I stumbled onto the guerrilla movement. I was 24, so very young, and that really marked the way I think about international politics. It was a source of inspiration, but it was also very tough, because I heard kids talking about how their parents or their brothers were killed. Irian Jaya was annexed in the late 1960s. It was John F. Kennedy, actually, who pushed for Sukarno to have Irian Jaya annexed to Indonesia, because he was afraid it was getting too close to Khrushchev. So, there you already have the whole international setup, which often comes back in my films, this whole Cold War scenario, and global politics were already part of that situation as well. It was about petrol, but also, when I was there, they had napalm strewn over a village in the highlands where the Freeport copper mine was. There, they discovered a mountain of gold and a mountain of copper, which made a profit of one million dollars a day. Not many people talk about it, but it’s one of the biggest mining operations ever, because they cut the whole mountain. In 1986, I heard through Amnesty International (I wasn’t there personally, but it was in the same highlands) that people were killed with napalm gas. However, this was not in the news internationally. I figured out that there was a lot of stuff happening with the transmigration project that the World Bank had set up to bring poor peasant families from Java to Irian Jaya. The Indonesian military followed. Now, the local population, the First Nation, the Melanesians, are outnumbered. This is very tragic. A month or two months ago, I heard they bombed the village where I was doing fieldwork. Of course, I had an academic background, but I was also confronted with real politics while in the field. And that marked me, and that maybe pushed me to rethink what cinema is, what as a filmmaker do you add to political life and to the political debate, how far can a filmmaker have access to politics, etc. This is more like dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, my film that came after, in 1997. It’s very much about the filmmaker’s role in relation to politics. In that film, there is a dialogue between a terrorist and a novelist. While studying in New York, I watched the Iraq War on television. That also marked me. You had strawberry ice cream spliced against images of Iraq and missiles going into the war zone. For the first time, television cameras were mounted on missiles, and when they hit the ground, you heard white noise. White Noise is the title of the novel by Don DeLillo, which became sort of the backdrop for our history. So, being in film school, but at the same time being confronted with international politics, somehow defined the way I would tell stories.

Q: So, you have always been interested in global politics and media manipulation…
A: Shouldn’t we? There is a genocide in Gaza. Everybody should speak up. This might be the shortest answer, but it’s much more than that. I think the clash between very intimate stories and bigger politics is a very fertile ground for telling a story. In Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, you have all these home movies that Sergei Khrushchev shot of his dad, Nikita Khrushchev. You have the home movies of Andrée Blouin that I got through Eve Blouin, who was an advisor to the film. Or the home movies of In Koli Jean Bofane, who has a remarkable story. He’s a Belgo-Congolese novelist, but his mother and he were kidnapped by a Belgian rubber baron who became his stepfather, Monsieur Casse, who’s in the film holding his half-sisters. So, he was also a filmmaker. In Koli Jean Bofane has a very ambivalent relationship to those images that talk about the displacement of bigger politics as well. Being born in Congo, having a dad who kidnapped his mom, but then the dad, who was Belgian, brought him to Brussels, this displacement, all that is sort of the backdrop of those home movies he told me I could use in the film. However, he has a very ambiguous relationship with this because of his extended family. These are remarkably beautiful images, dating from that time. For me, this is the heartbeat of Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, where you have this clash between something very intimate and the bigger politics. Even here, in Bucharest, there’s a huge backdrop that goes back to the Cold War with Ceaușescu, and sometimes that still defines how we stand in the world, right? For me, that’s always interesting. And this is present in all the films. dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is also an autobiographical film. It’s very much about my daughter, who was living across the ocean. I was flying every three weeks, and she was flying every other half a month. The film is infused with this. It’s about how you say goodbye at the airport, but that is marked by international politics, which defines your very intimate life. So, I like that clash.

Q: Do you consider yourself a political filmmaker?

A: I would say that politics doesn’t exclude poetics. When Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet, was asked, “Why do you write about love?”, he said, “I write about love to expose the conditions that don’t allow me to write about love”. As a Palestinian poet, he’s expected to write about Palestinian politics, but why should he? He says: “If I inherently write about love, it implies also the political situation”. Then, you have to define what politics is, because we’re bombarded with images and stories in this world where we sometimes don’t even know what our proper story is on a national, global, or intimate level. For me, if you reclaim your storytelling, that’s in itself already very political, because you claim your access to the world.

Q: You have quite a unique voice in the documentary film world because you are a multimedia artist as well, and you often challenge traditional documentary forms. Where do you position yourself in this world?

A: Well, my films are often described as essay films. dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, for example, premiered together with the CD-ROM Immemory by Chris Marker at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.Chris Marker was a huge influence for me as well. So, the idea of essay film would be part of it. But I think every documentary, every project, every story should inherently have its own device of how you access that story. For Soundtrack, as music was so important, it became the protagonist in that film. And it was told from the point of view of the music. Not only, I think history itself became the protagonist of this film. There’s no such thing as a talking head explaining everything. I thought it was so crucial, cross-culturally, to open up a dialogue. It’s very kaleidoscopic, as I entered into a dialogue with four narrators. However, dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is completely different. That film talks about hijacking and terrorism, and about flying airplanes and saying goodbye. The extreme of a flying airplane would be a sabotaged or a bombed plane. There is the moment of the execution, and, of course, hijacking is a postponement of the execution. Something of a dramatic triangle sets in, and I thought that was interesting. But also confronting that with a dialogue between a terrorist and a novelist, which you have in Don DeLillo’s book Mao II, was very appropriate. Another example is Double Take (2009), a film about the rise of the culture of fear through television. I thought it was interesting that precisely at the beginning of the 1960s, when a lot of cinemas were closing down and television was on the rise, Hitchcock crossed over to television. This dialogue that was set up between Hitchcock and Hitchcock, one representing TV and the other cinema, was an interesting device to access that story. So, I think that maybe every documentary is also trying to redefine what the documentary is all about. Even from its very inception, if you look at Nanook of the North by Flaherty. It’s the fight and the struggle of man against nature, which is complete fiction. The wives of Nanook of the North were the mistresses of Flaherty, the filmmaker. And the igloo was a big theatre setup, because the tripod was too big for the igloo, and they had to build a stage to shoot the film. So, from the very first major documentary, fiction and storytelling devices become part of the film. There are two different movements: Eisenstein, embellishing and dramatizing the story, on the one side, and Dziga Vertov, more of an involved filmmaker, where the storytelling devices become a part of the movie, on the other. So, you can dramatize and fictionalize your story, or you can tell it in a sort of self-reflexive way. For me, the way one would define documentary becomes very much part of the mythology of that particular story, of how to tell it. And every documentary also interrogates what the documentary is about, because you talk about reality, and reality raises a lot of questions. So, all of that becomes part of how you inherently define reality in documentary filmmaking. But that’s a larger question.

Q: How do you personally cope with the representation of violence in your films, such as the two presented here at the One World Romania festival, Shadow World and Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat?

A: I think there is an eerie balance between poetry and violent images. In Soundtrack, there is a lot of talk about victimization, but you don’t actually see a lot of violence. You read about it. Like when the South African mercenary talks about the fact that Balubas are still cannibals, so you can just shoot them, and it’s not as bad as shooting, say, an Irishman or a German. It’s in words, but the violence is there nevertheless. And then, for example, Léonie Abo talks about the women being raped. And then, “Congo Müller” talks about the fact that he not only shoots black people, but he also goes to classical concerts at the Goethe-Institute in Kinshasa. So, the violence is more suggested in the words you hear and read, but it’s not really filled. That’s because there’s always a danger of appropriation from me, as a white Belgian filmmaker. There is something about the victimization of the black body that I was very careful not to delve into. I want to add one thing. Even if I wasn’t born in Gaza or in East Congo, I can speak in solidarity. It’s speaking with, rather than speaking for. So, the question of violence, in Soundtrack at least, is related to that as well. I didn’t want to have talking heads or real images of violence, because there’s the danger of sensationalizing. I thought it was more interesting to have it contextualized. You only see one person being killed in the film, and that’s when “Congo Müller” talks about Gualtiero Jacopetti. Those images are contextualized because he says the terrible thing that Jacopetti asked the killers to put the victim, who was about to be shot, in the sunlight, so that the shot would be better. It’s very ludicrous, very cynical. And then you read about how you could buy an execution for 500 Congolese francs. This is all in words, but whenever there’s violence, it’s contextualized. It’s very different in Shadow World, where you see the images of Sarajevo. There, you have Chris Hedges saying that if you talk about war, everything is so sanitized. He discusses the fact that we don’t even have direct access to war unless we live in a war zone. Maybe, if we had access to that, war would happen less. War is sold through Hollywood or on television as heroic. But the heroism of the army is a complete lie. That’s really media manipulation. And so maybe it’s a facet also of exposing that. As for dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, people say this is a postmodern film, but for me it’s very modernistic because it really argues for analyzing media, in a sense where ethical principles are very much part of the film. You can see how cynical the news is these days; it’s much worse than what is being portrayed in dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. A lot of things have been questioned in such a way that, for me, it’s an ethical stance of arguing against it, raising the question: “Can we carve out a different world?” In Shadow World, as well, there’s Michael Hart alluding to Machiavelli’s The Prince and asking: “Should we rule by fear or by love?” In The Prince,the advisor says: “You should rule by fear, because that’s in the locus of the ruler. Fear can help you be in control”. But if you rule by love, the population is actually in love, because they decide if they still love what’s in power or not. So, he raises the question if we should rule in a different way. Despite being traumatized, Chris Hedges claims there’s also an argument for connection. You cannot transform or overcome your trauma or your PTSD if you cannot connect to other people. There’s a huge argument in Shadow World, which opens with this embrace of 10,000 soldiers during First World War. It was the Christmas truce that happened several times on both sides. You see Russian soldiers dancing with German soldiers or British soldiers having a cigarette with German soldiers. And this was not an exception. It was mostly the infantrymen crossing no man’s land and embracing each other. And it was the generals shooting above the heads of everybody to push them back into war. If we have an African-American soldier flying into Iraq, he’s not pushed there by aggression. He’s actually going there because he wants to pay his tuition. That’s a structural problem. I think that violence is inherent in a society. It’s what Walter Benjamin says about law. Law is enforced by violence, by the threat of the gun, by the cops, or by the Secret Police (Securitate). It’s the threat of violence of the ones that are in control of society. So, inherently, structurally, maybe society is built on some sort of violent principles. Walter Benjamin also asks: “If you argue for a nonviolent society, if pacific means are inherent, how can you protect those pacific means?” Or it’s like what Frantz Fano says, that non-violence is actually the privilege of the colonizer. So, violence has to be contextualized, I feel, if we talk politically. It was a huge question in Shadow World, because for me, the dramatic principle comes through contrast. How would we confront war with its opposite? Should we talk about peace? Very often, peace is described as the absence of war, which I think is not true. Peace has its own inherent values that you cannot equate with the absence of war. It is something about the social fabric that makes a society safe. Trade would be one of them, for example. We thought: “How can we imagine the contrast to war?” We took this whole discussion by Michael Hart about fear and love, and then love swept into the film bit by bit. This love, as Chris Hedges said, it’s not like a picture postcard of Hallmark. It is the deep social bond that we have actually lost access to. He refers to Dostoevsky, speaking about the inability to feel the other. This is what creates violence. We lost that trust in what the law is. But then, we have to define what law is, of course, and this is a whole different discussion, which may be the subject of my next film, Tea with ET.

Q: How do you perceive the impact of AI on documentary filmmaking?

A: Well, this is a recent development, but I feel what’s really at stake today is reality itself. It’s not just a question regarding documentary filmmaking. AI is going to marry wetware and biology, which I think we already did. Maybe it is also related to the theme of my next film, Tea with ET. I think that biology mixed with AI is going to really change our lives, and we will have a hybrid humanity. It’s a question of technology as well, if technology is still a sort of floating bubble that is owned by corporations. You have to know that the very building blocks of life, the DNA, is being privatized by conglomerates such as Monsanto Bayer, Dow Chemical, or ChemChina. These are three conglomerates that actually own 60% to 70% of all the seeds in the world. Life is being patented by corporations. I think the big question of technology is: “Who’s going to make designer babies? Who is going to be able to make a beautiful baby?” Those who will benefit first are the people who have money, because the technology is owned by corporations. And I think that’s the big conundrum. If AI is run by big corporations, that’s detrimental. I believe, with Chris Hedges, who says it also in Shadow World, that we have undergone a corporate coup d’etat in slow motion. Now, a lobby system and corporatocracy are having a hold on the government. People have their mouthful about Trump or Biden, but I think that’s just a structural problem. Trump is only a symptom of something much larger. You have three defense lobbyists for every politician in Washington. For me, that’s the big question: “Who will own AI? Who will have the rules to exacerbate surveillance through AI?” We live in a corporate world that has access to how we define social fabric. And again, it goes back to the question of what the social fabric is, and I think we lost that. If Shadow World, for example, is all about how our taxes are being privatized by a defense contractor economy, that’s very dangerous to me. How can we find again that social fabric? That’s a crucial question. Because everything has been sacrificed at some sort of celebration for this selfish greed. We made a film with Raymond Tallis, a neurologist, who talks about tickling, saying that you cannot tickle yourself; you need the other to tickle you. That’s the ontology of the other, that inherently consciousness is shared, just like language. We share language, and that’s the way we give expression to our subjectivity, through shared words. So, we have to redefine what the social fabric is.

Q: How do you see what is happening today with the documentary? I feel it’s more and more difficult to define this medium, as opposed to fiction.

A: Well, I think fiction is also borrowing aesthetic codes from the documentary, which doesn’t live in a bubble. We’ve seen it through experiments such as the one of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin with cinéma vérité. Even in Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d’un été), at the end of the film, they are discussing having dinner. Cinéma vérité is already, from its inception, very much a failure, because if you hold up a camera, you’re mediating reality. It comes back to the question of how you define reality. I think reality is at stake. It’s a symptom of something larger. We have to look at reality as a whole, but if you want to define reality, you also have to define consciousness. Because that’s how we access reality, right? As for consciousness, there are two ways in which it is defined within scientific circles. In the first view, consciousness was there from the very beginning; in order to come about, it has to be already there. David Bohm, who was a quantum physicist turned philosopher, says we have the implicit order and the explicit order, and consciousness is the implicit order. Consciousness may be the basis of everything. That’s the panpsychist school. And then the other school talks about emergence, that actually consciousness came at the very end of evolution as a sidebar. But there’s problems with that, because they cannot explain how consciousness arises. I think that’s interesting to explore, but it’s precisely that at the crux of everything, including AI. At the end of the day, you don’t know any more what’s really real. Cinema or documentary was always an essence of mediation. So, the big question, at least for me, is what is reality. All follows from there. Because I think that, once AI becomes part of how we make images, sooner or later biology or telepathy will become part of that. So, it’s a more encompassing question, I think. It’s a philosophical question as well. What’s always crucial is the bigger context for me. For the man with the movie camera or the woman with the movie camera, because there was also a woman with the camera, the big question is how you display the medium while you’re working through that medium. On a second level, you talk about the access to what your story is about. That, for me, is crucial as well. It’s like in the middle of dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, when you suddenly see the words “INSERT COMMERCIAL HERE”. Or you’re in the middle of Soundtrack and suddenly you see an iPhone or a Tesla commercial. It’s funny, at one point, but it’s also a Brechtian rupture, I feel, in the sense that, even with AI, you could have these Brechtian ruptures where you reveal how you actually work through things. So, I feel that the context is also very important to interrogate.

Q: Could you tell me more about your next film that you mentioned, Tea with ET?

A: I think the big black hole that we never talk about is consciousness. And when you talk about AI, that’s also the big question: “What is consciousness? Or the nature of mind?” And Raymond Tallis says that consciousness is relational. If you say: “I think, therefore I am” (Cogito, ergo sum), like Descartes, that is maybe half the picture, because, if you say “I”, what is the “I”? You learn the I through being in language and being in society with other persons. You can only know yourself, not in a bubble, because you wouldn’t even be able to compare, but it is because you live with other persons that you actually start recognizing notions of self. So, you cannot say: “I think, therefore I am”. It’s better to say: “We dialogue, therefore we are”. And again, it comes back to that relation, which I think is crucial. This whole scientific and corporate bubble has created a division between object and subject, it has instrumentalized the world through technology, so that nature has become the other. This othering of nature is a fallacy; it’s a wrong distinction. If you pollute the rivers, you pollute yourself. We put culture above nature, or subject above object. Our objectified worldview has been made technocratic. That, I think, is a fallacy. That’s a new epistemology, like with entanglement, for example. We live in an intersubjective world, where you cannot separate objects from subjects; the observer and the observed are always entangled. And I think it’s very much again that relationship, that social bond between people. That is hardly being questioned, because consciousness has been written out of the materialistic positivistic paradigm. But it’s not, that’s a myth. We’re all connected to the world. We breathe, the trees exhale, and we’re all connected. For me, that is a big question today. It’s the same with the water or the air. You cannot separate it from the way you stand in the world. Our bodies, our cells, all that is not separate from the rest of the world. So, it’s that connection to the world that I think we have hardly defined, on every level. Tea with ET is also called The Multispecies Parliament. What is multispecies? There’s this book by James Bridle about ways of being, about plant intelligence. We have put ourselves above plants, or whales, or dolphins. But now they start realizing that dolphins and whales are communicating in ways that we don’t even understand. With the sonars, we’ve been able to figure out that they can actually decode echolocation into images, because sounds are also images. There’s so much more to a complex life that we don’t even understand. Maybe trees also have a shared consciousness. A tree is not an individual. They live in forests, and there’s a mycelium underneath that communicates, and it’s all interconnected. We placed ourselves above all this. It’s a kind of hubris for humans. How can we commit to science and just kill it to study it? Well, that’s the wrong way to go about. You cannot cut off science from what an object is. You cannot cut a tree and then say that you studied it. You have to understand what’s going on in an empathic way. So, what does multispecies mean? And what is a parliament? The term comes from the word parlare, which means sharing or having a dialogue. And I think dialogue is so crucial. The dialogue with the world. The fact that we cut ourselves off from the world explains how we were able to invent extraction technology. Maybe that’s why AI will come in. If technology, wetware, and biology are all mixed, then maybe we will be faced with another way of learning about ourselves. But that is not cut off from consciousness, I think. You’re never going to understand the conversation on a telephone if you take apart the telephone, right? Or, if you take apart a radio, you’re not going to receive any more signals. I think that’s the conundrum.

Q: Are you familiar with Romanian cinema?

A: My friend Dominique Nasta always asks me if I know this and that Romanian film, but the only reference I have is Videograms of a Revolution, the film by Andrei Ujică and Harun Farocki that came out in 1992. That’s why I know a little bit about Romanian politics and what happened here in 1989. If I can recall something about Romanian politics, it’s from that film. And I know that, even if it was called a spontaneous revolution, the Securitate was already planning everything behind the scenes. It was sort of grabbing again the power through the Securitate.

Q: As you may know, Videograms of a Revolution is part of a trilogy by Andrei Ujică, together with Out of the Present and The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu.
A: Well, I also know Out of the Present, the second one. In fact, Dominique Nasta set up a dialogue between Andrei Ujică and me in Ghent. She made the comparison between our films, noticing that Double Take and even Shadow World have images that he also uses in his films. And we screened fragments of all these films. I think I showed Double Take and a bit of dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. Soundtrack was not finished at that time.