Established in 1997, the Persistence of Vision Award honors the achievement of a filmmaker whose main body of work falls outside the realm of narrative feature filmmaking. This year the award goes to Belgian filmmaker and multimedia artist Johan Grimonprez.

Who owns our imagination in a world of existential vertigo, where truth has become a shipwrecked refugee? Is it the storyteller who can contain contradictions, who can slip between the languages we have been given to become a time traveler of the imagination? Johan Grimonprez’s critically acclaimed work dances on the borders of theory and practice, art and cinema, going beyond the dualisms of documentary and fiction, other and self, mind and brain to weave new pathways in how we perceive our realities. Our histories and memories are not only a means to reimagine our contested past, but also tools to negotiate our shared presents. In Wonderland, the Queen rephrases it to Alice: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” Grimonprez’s feature films include dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1998), Double Take (2009), and Shadow World (2016). His curatorial projects have been exhibited at museums worldwide, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His works are in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; and Tate Modern, London.

About the Film