Directing
"| love how monad 5 defies the other monads by being a person, you" My personal history of 2025 as it runs through everyone I know. Monad 5 is a film composed of parts of me and parts of others, texts, images, and found footage gathered over a year, a shitting portrait of how we move through the world now.
Collectively authored cut-for-cut remake of the 1929 film of the same name through the lens of internet-based aesthetics. Drawing a lineage from the experiments of Soviet montage to contemporary trends such as sludge content, desktop documentary, corecore, and database cinema, Man with a Movie Camera (2025) attempts to reinvigorate the popular avant-garde project of a universal cinematic language which was originally developed almost a century ago by Dziga Vertov and The Kinoks.
Monad, situates webcam footage, projection mapping and texting both within the time space of the film and in the real time space outside, reformulating itself with each screening until Monad becomes fully saturated or until submarine internet cables stop working, whichever comes first.
Freud describes having read about the Acropolis extensively before accidentally encountering it in person. When he finally sees it, he experiences a strange disorientation a moment of is this really it? In this encounter, the real becomes destabilized. Re-representation of representation. What is “real”?
Dana Dawud’s Palcorecore (Palestine) is 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. The film was commissioned by Onty and OnMyComputer for the CoreCore symposium which took place in New York, November 2023.
Dawud's Noah's Ark is a video-essay centered around the notion of the flood myth (myths in which a great flood, usually sent by a deity or deities, destroys civilization, often in an act of divine retribution). Multiple civilisations scattered around the globe all possessed versions of this ancient narrative. A great deluge to wash away greater sins and start all over. Hardship, renewal, vengeance: scriptural texts and civilisational lore featured extreme weather as lead characters. Through a flood of TikToks, eco-protest images, Gilgamesh and Earth's autofiction, Dawud invokes deep time tales of Noah’s Ark in new light. The work reappropriates parables beyond being merely vehicles of narratives, situating them as a mirror from which we can reflect upon our understanding the world and of ourselves.
