Drawing on a location test filmed in Uganda and an email exchange with the location scout, The Recce captures cinema’s ties to land and its entanglement with colonial imaginaries, binding the fiction of filmmaking with the fiction of state-building.
The Recce
a film by
Daniel Mann
Biography
Daniel Mann is a London-based filmmaker and writer. His feature films have been screened at the Berlinale, the Rotterdam Film Festival, Cinema du Réel, DOC NYC, the Hong Kong Film Festival, Documenta Madrid, DocLisboa, Visions du Réel, and the ICA in London. Mann is the author of Occupying Habits: Media as Warfare in Israel\Palestine (Bloomsbury, 2023), as well as several essays and peer-reviewed articles. His current book project, titled Hot Locations: Cinema on the Planetary Frontier (forthcoming with UC Press in 2026), explores the neocolonial economy of desert film locations and the material politics that connect cinema and hyper-arid lands. Mann was a fellow at the Camargo Foundation and is now a part of the film studies faculty at King’s College London.
Filmography
● The Recce – 2025, short
● Under a Blue Sun – 2024, feature
● The Magic Mountain – 2020, feature
● Salarium – 2018, mid-length
● Low Tide – 2017, feature
● Future Diaries – 2013, short
● Complex – 2011, short
