The Recce

In 1904, the European leaders of the Zionist Organization considered the highlands of Uganda to be a potential “new promised land” for the Jewish people. Supported by British colonial administrators, who saw it as a way to advance their colonial project while cynically ridding England of its Jewish population, Nachum Wilbush went out there to study the quality of the land and water, the climate and the local fauna and flora. He returned with hand-drawn maps, landscape photographs and notes. But his diary does not say why he cut short his expedition and never wanted to return. When filmmaker and researcher Daniel Mann (Under a Blue Sun, VdR 2024) creates a film project to relate this expedition, he embarks on an exchange of images and emails with a location scout in Uganda. Through this exchange, The Recce – a term used in both the military and film production to refer to reconnaissance and scouting – presents cinema as a fiction-making machine intrinsically linked to imperial logic. It reveals how lands become landscapes, uninhabited sets, available and ready to be
claimed.

Mourad-Anis Moussa

The Recce, 2026  
Under a Blue Sun, 2024
The Magic Mountain, 2020
Salarium, 2018
Low Tide, 2017
Future Diaries, 2013
Complex, 2011
The Birdman, 2009