“A demon roams through an ominous synthetic environment, reconstructed from satellite images of Russian air bases: Khmeimim in Syria, Baranovichi in Belarus, and Belbek in Ukraine. Passing through their deserted corridors, interrogation rooms, and electricity substations, this parasitic force sprawls out from the military structures. Devastation follows in its wake.”

In Onset, Engelhardt and Cinkevich craft an unholy alliance of medieval demonology, open-source intelligence, and CGI animation to uncover the hidden life of these military outposts. Over the course of the film, the true horror of Russian colonialism becomes manifest in the process of possession – the imposition of external control that gradually destroys an organism from within.”

For Simiyya, Anna Engelhardt has made a custom edit of Onset ⊹ Khmeimim. The edit centers a persistent oscillation between the virtualization of colonial warfare and its actualized physical wounds in landscapes, infrastructures, and bodies. As these poles are soldered together they pick up a demonic possession that also blueprints an anti-colonial Exorcist’s International to come. Here, the investigatory exists outside the illusion of enlightened facts propagated by liberal democratic modes of truth-making but opens for fictional probes into the space of forensics and historical accountability.