This film was released 2nd April 2010 and is no longer screening.

Zapping from Hitchcock to his real-life double, from JFK to Khrushchev, from Cold War paranoia to vintage coffee adverts, this provocative and witty celluloid collage is quite unlike anything we’ve seen before.

Inspired by a Jorge Luis Borges short story, Belgian media artist Johan Grimonprez’s dazzling assemblage imagines Hitchcock meeting his sinister doppelganger during the shooting of The Birds, only later to introduce one Ron Burrage, a portly former waiter now earning a living as a successful lookalike for the long-departed Master of Suspense. In the meantime, archive footage reconstitutes the superpower sparring which brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation in the early 1960s, positing the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. as doubles locked in potentially fateful rivalry. The connection? The film ultimately suggests that the commodification of fear, whether on a cinematic or geopolitical level, is simply ingrained in our ongoing history – hence gimlet-eyed Donald Rumsfeld and his notorious ‘known unknowns’. Intoxicatingly original, and quite brilliant.