ENCODE x TIFF

An apparent transformation of human culture from the ground up raises exciting as well as worrying questions about the direction and future of cinema. We address a few of them by bringing together different points of perspective on making and viewing film under rapidly changing conditions of production.

We bring together a filmmaker, a critic, a scholar, and a student, to share their impressions of the tech-human interface. Participants will include Kenyan-Swiss director and screenwriter Damien Hauser, and Minna Johanna Niemi, Professor of English Literature at UiT.

Two recent, groundbreaking films are in focus, Damien Hauser’s Memory of Princess Mumbi (2025) and Piotr Winiewicz’s About a Hero (2024). Each highlights and rehearses, in its own distinctive way, novel challenges and opportunities of documentation. 

Winiewicz creates a mocumentary in dialogue with a chatbot designed to summon the spirit of iconic documentary filmmaker, Werner Herzog, while Hauser imagines an AI-assisted documentary of the distant future. Both films will be shown with accompanying introduction and Q&A prior to this roundtable event.

Time: Wednesday January 21, 2-4 PM
Place: Tromsø Library

Free entrance