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Backlight

VPRO Backlight is a biweekly documentary series. Each episode focusses on remarkable shifts in society, (geo)politics, economy, technology or culture, and their long-term consequences. In an attempt to provide radical hope for the future, we seek out leading thinkers, innovators and citizens who bring to light new ideas and ways of acting in a ceaselessly changing world.

episodes

NFT Mania
VPRO Backlight | video | 50 minuten | 15 mrt. 2022
What is going on in the art world? Some artists are suddenly receiving millions for their digital artworks due to the introduction of so-called NFTs. NFTs are "non-fungible tokens," a kind of digital property deed that makes virtual images tradable. For a year now, NFTs have been the expensive new toys of often young, anonymous collectors with lots of crypto money. Van Gogh died poor, but for ...
Bullshit Jobs
VPRO Backlight | video | 44 minuten | 24 mrt. 2019
What is a bullshit job and who has a bullshit job? Do you think that your work has no sense? Than it is likely that you have a bullshit job, that does not bring any satisfaction or any other benefit. In this documentary vpro and American anthropologist David Graeber look more closely at bullshit jobs, why they exist and what they do with us.
The space waste lab
VPRO Backlight | video | 50 minuten | 3 mrt. 2019
Artist and innovator Daan Roosegaarde is on a mission to a cleaner space. Currently, more than a hundred million pieces of space debris orbit the earth with a velocity of 25 thousand kilometers an hour. Should these fragments of discarded rockets and satellites collide, the consequences could be catastrophic to terrestrial communication. How can we clean up space, and who is going to do it?
Dear Passengers
VPRO Backlight | video | 50 minuten | 17 feb. 2019
You’ll no longer hear the announcement 'ladies and gentlemen' when travelling through a train station in the Netherlands. This has been replaced with 'dear passengers' to include all travelers: ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and everyone who does not feel comfortable within that traditional binary. Even before we are born we are pigeonholed. From then on we are socialized to understand ...
Paul Kingsnorth, Portrait of A Recovering Environmentalist
VPRO Backlight | video | 49 minuten | 16 dec. 2018
Former environmentalist and author Paul Kingsnorth has withdrawn to Ireland, to a rare and unspoilt part of the planet. You could say: to the end of the world. A portrait of an apocalyptic thinker who, nevertheless, never gives up hope and continues to have faith in the power of nature. Thinker and author Paul Kingsnorth climbed the barricades as a nature conservationist at an early stage. ...
The kids are alt-right
VPRO Backlight | video | 45 minuten | 13 mei 2018
Donald Trump and Thierry Baudet were both portrayed with the green head of Pepe the Frog. The frog grew from being a fairly innocent comic book character into a controversial internet icon. During the American presidential elections Pepe was even officially named as being a symbol of hate. Pepe now stands alongside the logo from the Ku Klux Klan and the swastika. How can a frog with ironic ...
Radical Right-Wing Vanguard
VPRO Backlight | video | 47 minuten | 29 apr. 2018
Members of the radical right-wing group Identitarian Resistance recently stood in Amsterdam across from failed asylum seekers. All across Europe the sound of the radical right is becoming stronger. People feel threatened by the arrival of migrants and are searching for unity and Heimat (homeland), old values placed in a new jacket. Meanwhile there is evidence of an assertively operating ultra ...
Slave to the algorithm
VPRO Backlight | video | 45 minuten | 22 apr. 2018
Whether you will get a job or a mortgage, even who will be released from prison: algorithms are taking over a growing number of the big decisions in our lives. Because algorithms are faster and more efficient than humans. But do they also always make better decisions? And what does a society look like in which we are being steered by big data and computer codes? Businesses, and to a growing ...
Politics of belonging
VPRO Backlight | video | 45 minuten | 15 apr. 2018
How can we overcome the ever-increasing alienation, loneliness and ecological catastrophe? A new story is needed to free the population from the overpowering efficient thinking. The influential British thinker George Monbiot has the answers to tell us how to get out of this chaos. We must reinvent our relationship to nature, our fellow human beings, society, politics and especially to ...