After spending a year in Damascus, The Speculative Archive (Julia Meltzer and David Thorne) compiled a series of records and documents, perhaps real, perhaps created: in not a matter of if but when (U.S./Syria, 2005, 12 mins), texts and translations, interviews, and brief shots of the city come together to contemplate life in the Middle East during the “war on terror.” As the title suggests, Re(collection) (Arshia Haq, U.S., 2005, 19 mins) shifts between notions of collecting-to preserve, to identify, to know-and ways of remembering, through photographs, through memories, through the heart. This beautiful film creates poetic connections among the Urdu language, a series of unidentified photographs, a collection of insects, and an antiquated press. Soon-Mi Yoo's contemplative, evocative Ssitkim-Talking to the Dead (U.S./South Korea, 2004, 36 mins) investigates the suppressed history of the annihilation of a rural Vietnam village by South Korean soldiers fighting for the United States. The dead “speak” through archival footage and recordings; the living grieve through a traditional commemorative ceremony for those who died “unhappy deaths.”