“I have a couple of questions,” an unseen person asks. Meanwhile, onscreen, an official stands at a podium, flanked by flags. The line—a colossal understatement—opens a new film by Alex Reynolds and Robert M. Ochshorn that runs more than 23 hours. What follows are thousands of questions, all of them about Israel and Palestine, and all of them posed by credentialed journalists at US State Department press briefings.The piece, collaged from official live streamed footage, begins on October 3, 2023, as Saudi Arabia was considering normalizing relations with Israel, and ends with the culmination of President Biden’s sole term in office. The film stars several weary, beleaguered journalists who come day after day—unshaven, baggy-eyed—just trying to get answers. This all might sound more conceptual than watchable, but it is oddly engrossing, like Christian Marclay’s The Clock meets C-SPAN. It’s also like a Get Out–type horror movie in which the monster is a real societal force—in this case, the US State Department. Reynolds and Ochshorn’s film is now getting its museum debut; it’s screening September 5 –6 at KANAL, the Centre Pompidou’s Brussels satellite. Previously, it was shown at galleries like Et al. in San Francisco, film festivals like Otherfield in the UK, and art fairs like ARCO in Madrid.The film is titled A Bunch of Questions with No Answers, and indeed getting answers proves difficult for the unnamed journalists attending the briefings. The responses to questions from two State Department spokesmen, Vedant Patel and Matthew Miller, were so evasive that the artists decided to edit them out entirely. The cuts at times make the spokesmen appear to emit a syllable salad, mockeries of the nothingburger statements that the journalists cannot alter, but that artists are free to mess with. It’s not difficult to see why their statements have been omitted as we see journalists ask for elaborations, clarifications, and concrete plans. These reporters point out contradictions and hypocrisies, and the tension in the room is palpable. “This is all rhetoric,” a woman exasperatedly replies. You get to know the different journalists: their personalities, approaches, and hints of their angles if not their beliefs. Despite the range, every one of them grows increasingly frustrated over time, their cool and calm demeanors giving way to furrowed brows and frustrated sighs.The straight-faced men in suits are not sympathetic characters. On occasion, they smirk with smarmy discomfort, as Miller does when a journalist asks about the State Department’s own Josh Paul. Paul resigned in October 2023, complaining that the IDF received preferential treatment when it came to arms sales, with their human rights records likely to be glossed over. “Is he right?” this journalist asks, and then Miller smiles, his chiseled face adding to his villainous vibe. He is later called out by an Associated Press journalist—the film’s straight shooter—for laughing and joking during a question about Israel blocking aid to Gaza. “The levity is a little bit inappropriate,” the reporter coldly states.Alex Reynolds and Robert M. Ochshorn: A Bunch of Questions with No Answers, 2025.Courtesy the artistsLots of questions double as attempts to wade through the misinformation, with journalists asking whether the things they heard about or read online are true, as when reporters try to get to the bottom of the bombing of the Al-Ahli hospital that occurred October 17, 2023. The State Department insists firmly on Israel’s innocence. Here, “How do you know?” becomes a recurring question, with many other reports coming to different conclusions than the State Department’s. A clear pattern has since emerged: Fewer than half of Gaza’s hospitals are now functioning, and Israel just bombed another this week, killing at least 20 people, including four Palestinian journalists.As the film progresses, distrust among the journalists grows, and in the absence of satisfying information, their questions get more methodological. “Do you have any way of keeping track of the number of Palestinians killed?” asks one man in mid-November. There are lots of leading questions, too—interrogatives not in pursuit of facts per se, but instead as a way of pressing for accountability and transparency. On October 10, one journalist asks: “Will you acknowledge that Palestinian children have been killed?” By October 23, after more than 50 percent of Gaza’s homes have been destroyed, another asks: “Is there any plan?”The journalists also try to get the spokesmen to acknowledge their hypocrisies: “You have in the past said it’s never right to hit a hospital,” notes one. “In this case, would you say that?” Things stay factual and specific, but pointed nonetheless.Making art out of atrocity is always fraught. How could you meaningfully enlist art—something so impotent and frivolous—when the stakes are so high? Then again, how could you turn your attention anywhere else? Reynolds and Ochshorn skip the earnest but doomed efforts of calling out low-hanging fruits like Trump and Netanyahu, and opt instead for solidarity over savior complexes, training our attention on American Democrats and bureaucrats over images of slain and starving Gazans. This choice has many implications—a reminder that the US is responsible for funding and supplying arms for the genocide, and that the Democratic party’s non-actions, lies, and hypocrisies helped elect Trump. But these are only ever implications; the raw footage speaks for itself.The film ends on January 15, 2025, Miller’s last day on the job. A ceasefire agreement has just been reached. That agreement won’t last, but the journalists don’t know that yet, though some suspect it. Reporters ask if Trump deserves more credit for the deal than Biden, and if the State Department has any regrets. Another woman asks if, when the dust settles, the US will count on immunity for its role in funding war crimes, which feels chilling in its likelihood. The State Department, after all, is well practiced in rebranding its atrocities. Such is the art of PR.