A Third Version Of The Imaginary

Benjamin Tiven's film is a stroke of documentary excellence, a piece that manages to convey in a few crisply composed minutes an absolute sense of its subject, something made more complex by the fact that its subject is something ephemeral and intangible and subject to all manner of whims and technical vagaries.

Narrated in Swahili with English subtitles, following the passage of unseen videos from one shelf of the Kenyan Broadcasting Corporation's archives to another, A Third Version touches on the oddities of an "amnesiac medium", of the difficulties of archivism where "the economy of the lost images is governed by luck", where proscriptions upon perception and edicts of excavation are part and parcel of the layered meaning of 'image'.

It's hard to discuss without getting too circular, but Tiven has constructed something truly special. Aided by documentarian's luck, you've got to be there for the happy accident and he was. Do not let this languish in a collection unobserved - seek it out, watch it, and remember.