Joseph Paris, a copyleft video art pioneer and iconoclast filmmaker, is to be known for the radical experimental feature documentaries Naked War and The Flag.
A pioneer in the use of copyleft licenses in video art, Joseph Paris founded the Kassandre collective, merging video and legal experimentation. In 2014, he directed the acclaimed documentary Naked War, which deconstructs the cinematographic grammar behind the spectacular actions of Femen. His latest feature film, The Flag, a furious anti-authoritarian film, was released in movie theaters in France on 2024, October 30th.
Joseph Paris contributed to the HBO series Exterminate All The Brutes directed by Raoul Peck and directed the innovative To Die Gracefully, a 24-hour live cinema project on YouTube.
He has a longstanding collaboration with Benjamin Lazar, including The Night of Hieroglyphs at the Institut de France, the video creations for Lazar's shows Heptameron and Maldoror, and the production of The Forest of Masks, featured in the Toyen exhibition in 2022 at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.
Currently, Joseph Paris is developing a film in Ukraine and engaging in various artistic projects with author Joanna Dunis and sound designer Alejandro Van Zandt-Escobar.
At the radio Cause Commune. Photo: Laurent Demartini
Presentation of the film The Flag at the IDFA festival.
Presentation of the film The Flag at the Movies That Matter festival.
«Confronted with austere archives of power, I felt the need to grasp them, literally. By revisiting and reformulating a 1960s and 1970s New York experimental cinema practice that involved scratching film strips, I found a way to think about images at a pace not dictated by media temporality. The time and effort devoted to each image, the physical contact with them and the radical slowing down of their flow made me see them differently, restoring the power to think and to act.»