Masterclass Bill Morrison

For more than three decades, Bill Morrison has worked with archival and found moving images, bringing materials that have been forgotten, damaged or overlooked in film history into new constellations. His films engage with the materiality of film as much as with the histories and memories carried by the images themselves.

Our partner festival in Nigeria is named after Morrisons probably best-known film, Decasia (2002), whose title combines the words “decay” and “fantasy”: Curated by Didi Cheeka, the Archive Film Festival Decasia takes place every two years in Lagos, alternating with Archival Assembly.

Morrison’s Oscar-nominated film INCIDENT (2023) uses found footage from more recent history. Composed entirely from police body-camera and surveillance footage, the film reconstructs the 2018 police shooting of Harith Augustus in Chicago through multiple synchronized perspectives. What initially appears as documentation of a single event becomes a reflection on evidence, point of view and the ways in which images are made and presented to produce a narrative.

In his new film, SAWYER AVENUE, SUNDAY AFTERNOON (2026), Morrison uses footage from cell phones and body cameras to chronicle and investigate a neighborhood’s struggle against impunity for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. On October 12, 2025, masked and unidentified ICE agents arrested a man without a search warrant on a residential street in Chicago.

In his masterclass, Bill Morrison will use the films shown to discuss how working with found footage has changed over the decades. Whereas the focus was once on discovering something new in the aesthetics of decay, these now omnipresent images serve as evidence in the fight against a government that abuses its power and uses violence against its citizens. The focus is no longer on the decay of the images themselves, but on the destruction of the world from which they originate. Preserving the images becomes an act of resistance.

Bill Morrison is a filmmaker best known for three films: Decasia (64 min., 2002), which was the first film of the 21st century to be named to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, Dawson City: Frozen Time (120 min., 2016), which holds a 100% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and INCIDENT (30 min., 2023), which was nominated for an Academy Award in 2025. His most recent film, SAWYER AVENUE, SUNDAY AFTERNOON (18 min., 2026) premiered this year at Visions du Réel 2026, and is available on newyorker.com.