---
title: 'Helenés (Apparition of Freedom)'
url: 'https://gogbot.nl/program/helenes-apparition-of-freedom'
markdown: 'https://gogbot.nl/program/helenes-apparition-of-freedom.md'
date: '2026-09-09'
description: 'Helenés (Apparition of Freedom) (2005 | 17''50") brings together two forms of political propaganda separated by time and ideology. In 1998, Christoph Draeger discovered and secretly removed a 16mm film from an abandoned civil-protection training camp in Hungary. The footage documents a Cold War mili…'
---

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# Helenés (Apparition of Freedom)

## Christoph Draeger

   Film   Concordia Cinema  

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 **Helenés (Apparition of Freedom)** (2005 | 17'50") brings together two forms of political propaganda separated by time and ideology. In 1998, Christoph Draeger discovered and secretly removed a 16mm film from an abandoned civil-protection training camp in Hungary. The footage documents a Cold War military exercise preparing civilians for the imagined devastation of nuclear war: gas masks, ruined landscapes, emergency procedures, and images of catastrophe.

In 2005, Draeger returned to this apocalyptic material and paired it with excerpts from George W. Bush’s second inaugural address, a speech organized around the promise of spreading freedom and democracy. The collision produces an uneasy symmetry between the ideological languages of East and West: images designed to prepare a population for annihilation become accompanied by the rhetoric of liberation. Rather than simply opposing propaganda with reality, *Helenés* reveals how fear, freedom, catastrophe, and political authority can be constructed through images and language.

Christoph Draeger is a Swiss artist and filmmaker whose work frequently engages with catastrophe, violence, disaster, and their representation through mass media and found images.

FILM BLOCK 4
Continuous screening - see [www.gogbot.nl/timetable](http://www.gogbot.nl/timetable) for the schedule

  ![Christoph Draeger](https://gogbot.nl/images/2/8/e/0/f/28e0fc57c6a26e78fdbada20bf8e3c79a5e2664a-helenes.jpeg) 

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