7:30 p.m.	we will live to see these things, or, five pictures of what may come to pass The Speculative Archive (U.S., 2007)

Two elegant works by Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, working under the name The Speculative Archive, provide a perspective on Syria at a time of tension and uncertainty. We will live to see these things examines different ways of envisioning the future through five discrete parts: an urban history, a recitation on political leadership, a portrait of a school for girls, the musings of a dissident intellectual, and a speculative meditation. Using various approaches to presenting information, and relying on both fictions and facts, The Speculative Archive call their work “‘documentary.’ Not ‘experimental documentary,’ not ‘mockumentary’ . . . or any of the other new genres that point to some kind of crisis of the real. We went to Syria and we made some documents and we put them together to make a documentary—a record of a particular time in a particular place.”

• (47 mins)

Preceded by short:
not a matter of if but when: brief records of a time in which expectations were repeatedly raised and lowered and people grew exhausted from never knowing if the moment was at hand or still to come (The Speculative Archive, U.S., 2006, 32 mins)

• (Total running time: 79 mins, Color, DigiBeta, From the artists)