Dana Dawud & 0nty & Redacted Cut - Open Secret

Open Secret is a touring internet cinema and screening series curated by Dana Dawud, rooted in a fluid network of artists with strong online practices, who are looking for (or revealing? or creating?) meaning in the omnipresent and endless stream of images that permeates our lives today. From intimate home videos over advertisements and curated selfies to direct war footage, these are images that are shared with everyone, online, but the proposition of Open Secret is to actually watch them together, physically, on the big screen.

https://www.instagram.com/opensecrett/

For the filmmakers of tonight, the “open secret” is that all these images and sounds that we encounter daily are important – that they perhaps are worth something true to us. Some films try to reveal the cinema in these images, the kinetic energy, and the shared experience, by cutting and editing them until meanings mutate into something new. Other films were created collaboratively through network connection, motivated by the original potential of (former) internet utopias.

screening

Nounposts (0nty, 2024, 7min)

"The dissociative and the anxious among us are asked to nounpost — name three things you can see in order to ground yourself. Posting a noun is a dwelling, holding, and accretion — but this is already a post-nouning — a relinquishing, a giving up, and a goodbye."

RNG Vol. 2 (Redacted Cut, 2025, ???)

An ongoing fanart net atlas resulting from an experimental playground, a laboratory of unrestricted abstractions. How to clip ideas and techniques, recollect them under local sections, blow them up into bigger ones and study how to glue these different scales and motifs together?

Monad (Dana Dawud, 2024-ongoing, 22min)

A film series in perpetual flux, combining projection mapping, texting and webcam footage by Dawud with scenes directed remotely—fragments solicited from online participants, each responding to her instructions. Neither fixed nor final, each screening reconfigures past, present, and future in order to destabilize authorship and cinematic space until Monad becomes fully saturated. Or until submarine internet cables stop working, whichever comes first.

Comedy Special (Mischa Dols, 2025, 9min)

"Intense, fast, flashy, but most of all confusing images cross my path as my friends reflect with me through voice messages and sharing footage of their not-so-everyday life. Together we evangelize internet cinema. When scared of images one can start with some text."

Palcorecore (Dana Dawud, 2023, 6min)

A hypnotic fusion of dance, archival footage, and internet-circulated videos that collapse past and present into a visceral portrait of Palestinian life. Opening with The Lovers Songs Band and excerpts from Jenin, Jenin (2003), the film assembles fleeting yet powerful images: flag-waving horseback riders, families at the beach, teenagers dancing in flames, and acts of resistance against occupation. Dawud’s deadpan narration—“I witness you witness me, we are martyrs together”—pulls the viewer into a shared act of witnessing. Through rhythmic disorder and movement, the film captures the resilience, rebellion, and everyday joys of Palestinian existence, focusing particularly on youth and women in their defiant assertion of life.

artist talk

Dana Dawud is a Palestinian artist, writer, curator, and soundcloud prophet based in Dubai, whose practice moves between film, montage, and sound design, navigating the fluidity of internet cinema across both online and offline spaces. Her work traces ruptures and reverberations in contemporary culture, often taking shape as experimental moving-image projects that resist closure and evolve through mutation and accumulation. She is the founder of Open Secret (2024–ongoing), a touring off-site screening series highlighting emerging and post-net artists, and Pleasurehelmet (2020–ongoing), a sound archive of experimental pieces and niche internet subcultures.

Due to IRL reasons, Dana fittingly joins tonight's talk through online video connection.

https://www.instagram.com/dansdansrev/

0nty is a writer and artist. Their work is focused on the relationship between the internet and the moving image. 0nty served as chief editor for Dialogues on CoreCore & the Contemporary Online Avant-Garde (Becoming Press, 2024). Their audiovisual works have appeared in venues such as The Wrong Biennale, Forum Stadpark, Foreign Objekt, and Millennium Film Workshop. As part of the Open Secret program, their work has toured international cities including New York, London, Hong Kong and Bogotá.

https://www.instagram.com/the.ontological.turnt/

Redacted Cut

The medium is the message, the editor is the camera, the film is the filmmaker.

https://www.instagram.com/redactedcut

Talk moderated by Brussels-based filmmaker and Open Secret community member Mischa Dols.

https://www.instagram.com/mischaapje/