The IMPAKT Festival 2004 is the fifteenth edition of the festival. To celebrate its fifteenth anniversary, we have organised an extra large program with many international guests. In numerous film screenings, presentations and concerts, works will be shown by artists from all over the world. The IMPAKT Festival 2004 takes place in various locations in the city of Utrecht, but its main location is Theater Kikker. Here you can find the festival centre, you can atted the artists' presentations of their projects, you can eat in the festival restaurant and in the evening you can go and listen to the concerts. The film programs of the festival can be viewed at Filmtheater 't Hoogt. From twelve o'clock till midnight you can enjoy a great variety of music videos, art films, documentaries, animations and games. In case you missed a program, the damage can be undone in the media centre of Ubica. There you can watch individual films and videos from the festival. Last but not least, the exhibition of the festival is located in various galleries in the city of Utrecht. Flatland Gallery, Expodium, Casco and the Academiegalerie collectively present the exhibition Flowers in the Dustbin, compiled by Clare Manchester.

In celebration of its fifteenth anniversary, IMPAKT has decided to introduce an award this year. An international jury of jury of Ed Halter (organiser of the New York Underground Film Festival), Brigitta Burger-Utzer (co-founder and director of Sixpack Film Vienna) and Arno van Roosmalen (director of TENT. Rotterdam) will assess all new films shown at the IMPAKT Festival and will award the three most remarkable productions.

In comparison to previous editions of the festival, documentaries are exceptionally well represented this year. This is only partly due to the increased popularity of this style among many artists in recent years. Especially with respect to Cultural Autopsy, we have chosen deliberately to embed the program in a selection of important documentaries concerning the theme of mutual influencing among cultures. Cultural Autopsy offers a view of our society from the perspective of the outsider and shows how the West has dealt with foreign cultures through the years. We wish you much enjoyment during the fifteenth IMPAKT Festival and hope you will notice afterwards that your view of our world has attained a slightly different shading.

Cultural Autopsy focuses on the way outsiders view our western society and parallel to that, on the way we ourselves perceive and represent foreign cultures. The perception and appraisal of cultural phenomena comes to the fore particularly when one culture adopts elements of another culture. Whether people adopt foreign elements of their own free will, as often happens in musical culture, or are forced to do so, as in the case of colonialism, the initial phenomena are always interpreted and transformed in the process. Through sub-themes like authenticity, exoticism, representation, tourism and globalisation, the programme will shed an illuminating and sometimes painful light upon intercultural misunderstandings and manipulations. The programme consists of a variety of genres: documentaries, music videos, animations, educational films and video art. Two artists, Lisl Ponger and Johan Grimonprez. have been invited to co-curate the program. In her work, Ponger analyses intercultural representation through tourist super 8 home- movies. Apart from giving an overview of her own work, she will also compile a part of the programme. The second guest curator of the programme is the Belgian video artist Johan Grimonprez. In the past, IMPAKT presented his projects Kobarweng, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y and Inflight on the IMPAKT Festival. In his work, Gimonprez shows himself to be a self-willed anthropologist of our western society.