This experimental documentary, part of Tran, T. Kim-Trang’s The Blindness Series, concerns a group of Cambodian women living in Long Beach, California. These women, survivors of the 1975—1979 Khmer Rouge regime, experience hysterical blindness. Images of Cambodia, of California, of treatment, of violence appear momentarily, and then blink into equal darkness, as a voiceover explains that this loss of sight was “not a cultural illness amongst Cambodians, otherwise a folk diagnosis and a traditional remedy would have been identified”. In fish-eyed close-up a camera scrolls along printed text: “TO KEEP YOU IS NO BENEFIT, TO DESTROY YOU IS NO LOSS.” Tran has written regarding the film: “to transcend what has been described as the ‘eye-searing’ horrors of war, these women cried themselves into blindness.”

• Programm Programme: Whole Body Like Gone (curated by Jamie Crewe)