Sonsbeek 2026 x Focus: Propaganda in reverse

The evening includes the international premiere of Pelle Nijburg's film First Row, made with funding received after winning the 2025 Gelders Film Pitch Award at Go Short Arnhem film festival. First Row depicts a small farming village in the west of Gelderland, in spring, just a few days after the Netherlands had been liberated by the Allies. Everything seems peaceful and normal, yet hundreds, if not thousands, of German prisoners of war will soon be passing by the living rooms and farms. The film features music and sound design by Birgit de Priester, with archival footage from Sound and Vision, Hilversum.

Selected from the Citizen X video programme, Rea Tajiri's History & Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991) is a poetic reconstruction of her family's history and memory, who were among the 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans imprisoned in internment camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Drawing on a range of sources, including interviews, memorabilia, Hollywood film scenes, and a pilgrimage to the camp where her mother was interned, Tajiri reflects on the difficulty of representing a past that people would rather forget than remember, as well as the impact of images on collective history and memory.

After the screening, Focus' Head of Programme and Education, Kim van der Werff, will be in conversation with Pelle Nijburg about the making of First Row. The pairing with Rea Tajiri's film offers a framework to discuss how artists have worked with film and archival material to reveal the layered nature of national collective memory, and to offer alternative perspectives on collective trauma, healing, and the passage of time.

“What interests me about working with archives is not criticising the past from the vantage point of a supposedly morally superior present. Rather, I am concerned with breaking free from linear time and ‘entrenched’ perceptions, so that space is created for alternative ways of thinking.” – Pelle Nijburg

Pelle Nijburg is a filmmaker whose work explores themes of human legacy, memory and the absurdity embedded in everyday life. She studied Audiovisual Media at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht and completed a master's degree in Lens-Based Media at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. During an artist residency, she developed the short film No Way Forward (2025), which premiered at Go Short - International Short Film Festival Nijmegen in 2025. This film and others, as well as her installations, have been exhibited in galleries across the Netherlands and screened at national and international film festivals.

Rea Tajiri is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and educator who creates installation, documentary and experimental films. Her work situates itself in poetic, non-traditional storytelling forms to encourage dialog and reflection around buried histories. One of her early works, History and Memory: For Akiko & Takashige went on to receive the Distinguished Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association and a Special Jury Award from the San Francisco International Film Festival and Best Experimental Video from the Atlanta Film and Video Festival. This documentary short has screened in over 250 venues around the world.

Throughout August and September, Focus Film Theater and Sonsbeek 2026 present Darkness Reframed - eight screening programs featuring cinema classics and artist shorts at the roof top cinema and in the cinema room. With introductions and Q&As afterwards, the film program opens up the space to reflect on how Western imperialisation and its inherited forms of representation have impacted memory. Departure point for the film program is the Heart of Darkness exhibition curated by Marianne Brouwer at the Kröller-Muller museum in 1994-95, which has been a touchstone for Sonsbeek 2026. Part of the exhibition was Citizen X, a video programme curated by Corinne Diserens, which will be revisited in Darkness Reframed.