BREACHED: A CHRONICLE OF CARGO THEFT
Thomas Dekeyser, Andrew Culp, 2024, USA, 15 min
Freight train robberies grabbed headlines in late 2021. Amidst a supply chain crisis, stark images of train tracks strewn with Amazon packages went viral. Consumers, awaiting delayed orders, spotted their items among the sea of cardboard. To reassure anxious shoppers, California’s governor joined the cleanup, while rail companies spent millions on added security.
Breached asks: What makes container freight so sacred yet so vulnerable?
The story is told from the POV of a local worker, drawn from his diary. His alienated existence unravels when he witnesses the robbers in action. A hidden landscape of logistics, infrastructure, and surveillance snaps into focus, both violent and fragile. The turning point comes when he trains himself to read the landscape like a looter, discovering a way to channel his disaffection into a strike against capitalist ideology.
MACHINE IN FLAMES
Thomas Dekeyser, Andrew Culp, 2022, USA, 50 min
A cinematic search for the elusive group CLODO, who bombed computer companies in 1980s Toulouse, France. Journeying through the cybernetic nodes of military, industrial, and socialist development, the film exposes how recording devices fail to collect the ashes of history. The film combines archival traces, a viral desktop choreography, and paranoid footage of nocturnal stakeouts into a philosophical investigation of self-combustion.
The film is the debut work of the Destructionist International, and the first in a series of films on the appetite for abolition in ultra-leftism. It was first distributed through a network of self-erasing USB data sticks dropped outside corporate campuses.