Bottled Songs 1: The Observer

Bottled Songs is an ongoing media project depicting strategies for making sense of on-line terrorist propaganda. Filmmakers and media researchers Lého Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee compose letters addressed to each other, narrating their encounters with videos originating from the terrorist group Islamic State (ISIS). In Bottled Songs 1, Chloé finds a phone video showing hundreds of ISIS captives running through a desert. It is posted on YouTube by a French state-funded news channel as a work of “citizen journalism”, which allows it to remain on-line and spread terror over several years.