Open Secret Amsterdam

Opening discussion for Open Secret Amsterdam, internet cinema screening at OT301's Ventilator Cinema on October 30, 2025 in Amsterdam. Organized in collaboration with THE VOID (Institute of Network Cultures) this conversation featured Onty (off screen), Dana Dawud (online), Mischa Dols, Jordi Viader Guerrero and was moderated by Persis Bekkering. Open Secret is a traveling series of online film screenings that relies on a fluid network of terminally online artists who seek (reveal? create?) meaning in the ubiquitous and endless stream of images that saturates us daily. Intimate home videos, commercials, curated selfies, or live war footage: these are images shared online with everyone, but Open Secret proposes that we actually watch them together, physically and on the big screen. Featuring films by Dana Dawud, Redacted Cut, Onty, Xafya Lovecraft, Daniel Stolzlederer, and Mischa Dols, the “open secret” in these films is that all these images and sounds that we encounter daily are important – that they perhaps are worth something true to us. Some films try to reveal the cinema in these images, the kinetic energy, and the shared experience, by cutting and editing them until meanings mutate into something new. Other films were created collaboratively through network connection, motivated by the original potential of (former) internet utopias. Background film: None of These People Exist (2022) by Onty