5000 Feet is the Best, 2011, HD video, colour, sound, 30 min. Courtesy of gb agency, Paris; Arratia Beer, Berlin
5000 Feet is the Best, 2011, HD video, colour, sound, 30 min. Courtesy of gb agency, Paris; Arratia Beer, Berlin
Omer Fast’s work shifts strategically between documentary and fictional registers in ways that ultimately destabilize our understanding of reality and media. Many of his recent works have engaged with the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the role of media, technology, and subjectivity. The video 5000 Feet is the Best is built from two simultaneous story lines. One consists of footage of interviews that he conducted at the end of 2010 with an American ex-drone pilot who talks about the work he did for five years that left him with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The identity of the speaker is concealed in this interview. The second story line consists of a fictional interview with an ex-drone pilot in a hotel room in Las Vegas, where he now is a security guard at a casino.
In the first interview, the ex-pilot talks calmly and practically about his job: hitting targets, and human factors like fatigue due to overwork. At certain points the interview shifts to a more emotional tone and the ex-pilot shares how he felt when he killed someone for the first time.
The atmosphere in the second interview is very different. The ex-pilot is irritated and answers in a hasty, indifferent manner. One passage of the interview is played over and over again, incorporating only minor changes that are hardly visible, like flashbacks. After telling two stories involving tricksters and make-believe, the ex-pilot tells a more detailed story about a family that is bombed and killed. This narrative resembles one the real ex-pilot tells about a bombing in Afghanistan, but with one major difference: the people are not bombed in Afghanistan, but in the United States, and by Chinese occupying forces.
Omer Fast, born 1972 in Israel, lives and works in Berlin