19/05/2026
Maybe Ask Dziga Vertov! • Christoph Rohrscheidt • 6' • Germany • 2025
Nearly a century ago, Dziga Vertov revolutionized cinema with The Man with the Movie Camera—a radical experiment in film language. A cinema of truth, without intertitles, without actors, without a script. He envisioned the camera as an all-seeing eye, capturing the world’s essence in its purest form. Today, in the age of artificial intelligence, we ask: How does filmmaking with algorithms compare to Vertov’s vision? Is AI merely another tool—a mechanical eye—or does it fundamentally alter the nature of cinematic creation? This film is both a homage to Vertov’s experiment and an exploration of the present moment in image-making. Constructed entirely from algorithmically generated worlds and scenarios, it questions whether the essence of cinema has truly changed. Is the machine’s gaze—just as Vertov once imagined—simply an extension of our eternal desire to make the invisible visible? Inspired by The Man with the Movie Camera, the film follows a day in a city that does not exist, yet feels familiar—an amalgamation of real places, shaped by memory and machine. Rooted in my own childhood recollections, it unfolds as a fragmented, ever-shifting journey through a place that is both real and unreal. Time collapses; everything happens at once. Streets dissolve, bodies distort, history rewrites itself in real time. Through the lens of AI, the film reflects on the instability of images, the fluidity of memory, and the limits of cinematic perception in a world where reality itself is increasingly synthetic.
🎥 Stockholm Independent Film Festival 🎥
