King's College London

'The Recce', a new short film by Dr Daniel Mann, Lecturer in the Department of Film Studies at King’s, will premiere at the 76^th Berlinale Film Festival in February 2026.

The film was selected for the Forum Expanded programme with two screenings scheduled on 16 and 18 February.

Drawing on present-day location test filmed in Uganda and an email exchange with a Ugandan scout, ‘The Recce’ explores cinema’s ties to land and its entanglement with (neo)colonial imagination. The name of the film has a double meaning: in military, it is the process of getting information about enemy forces; in filmmaking, it is a pre-filming exploratory visit to a shooting location.

‘The Recce’ is based on the historical context of a 1904 secret expedition to colonised East Africa.

In 1904, representatives of the Zionist Organisation conducted a discreet survey of the Ugandan highlands to evaluate the area as a possible location for a Jewish settlement. The initiative received quiet support from certain British Colonial administrators, who viewed East Africa as largely undeveloped territory within the empire. One Jewish delegate documented aspects of the region’s geography, climate, and local conditions during the exploratory mission. The specific events that occurred during the expedition – and the reasons the explorer later vowed to never return – remain a source of heated historical debate.

‘Through the recce (location test), land becomes vital both to filmmaking and state-building. It is sought after, colonised and constantly reimagined as elsewhere. At the core of the recce lies a potentially violent act: the erasure of one place in creating another. The recce, as this test is often called, is seldom regarded as a film, but embodies this very violence and the ongoing shadow of coloniality in its form’, Daniel Mann explains.

The 76^th Berlinale Film Festival takes place between 12 and 22 February 2026.

Daniel Mann is a filmmaker, writer, and lecturer in the Department of Film Studies at King’s College London.

Mann's films have been screened and awarded at numerous festivals, including the Berlinale, the Rotterdam Film Festival, Cinéma 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 forthcoming book, titled Hot Locations: Cinema on the Planetary Frontier (forthcoming with UC Press, 2026), explores the neocolonial economy of desert film locations and the material politics that connect cinema and hyper-arid lands.