Daniel Mann is a London-based filmmaker and writer whose work explores images and imaginaries of land and environment, often in relation to colonial and neocolonial politics, military occupation, and extractivism.

Mann's features and short films have screened and awarded at numerous festivals and institutions, including Berlinale, Visions du Réel, The Rotterdam Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel, Documenta Madrid, Karlovy Vary, DOC NYC, IDFA, the Hong Kong Film Festival and the ICA in London. His most recent film, 'The Recce', premiered at the 2026 Berlinale and received the Fugas Award at Documenta Madrid. His new film, 'The Law of the Hyena ', was the recipient of the 2026 Eurimages Development Award at Visions du Réel and is scheduled to be filmed in 2027.

Mann’s first monograph, 'Occupying Habits: Media as Warfare in Israel/Palestine' (Bloomsbury and SOAS Palestine Centre, 2023), examines images of colonial violence in the West Bank, Palestine. His second monograph, Hot Locations: Cinema on the Planetary Frontier (forthcoming with University of California Press, 2027), explores the desert as a distinctive extractive formation within cinema: an environment framed, captured, rendered, and circulated as both a war zone and an extraterrestrial world.

Mann was a Humanities and Social Sciences Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at King’s College London, and a Fellow at the Camargo Foundation.

Research interests and PhD supervision

I welcome applications from PhD candidates interested in working across a broad range of topics in film and media studies, including nonfiction cinema; cinema and environments; colonial and neocolonial histories of cinema; film materiality and materialism; film geographies; experimental ethnographies; and media and extractivism.

I am particularly interested in supervising practice-based research in which filmmaking forms an integral part of the research process, as well as original interdisciplinary projects that bring film and media studies into conversation with fields such as geography, environmental humanities, anthropology, and postcolonial studies.

More broadly, I welcome projects that challenge established definitions of cinema and explore how moving images intersect with land, infrastructure, ecology, materials, political histories, and forms of knowledge production.

Teaching

I teach modules on non-fiction film, media cultures, the politics of images, and introductory and advanced filmmaking, with a particular emphasis on documentary and experimental practices.

Expertise and public engagement

• Cineeuropa Interview (2026): Eurimages Development Award winner 
• The Recce (2026) premieres at Berlinale
• DocumentaMadrid (2024)- International Prize winner - Under a Blue Sun
• Solidarity Intelligence (2026) - Panel on AI at the Berlin Film Festival
• "Arid Visibilities" Symposium (2023): What practices of image-making can resist Israel's denial of Palestinian Bedouin lifeworlds in the Naqab Desert?

Selected publications

• Hot Locations: Cinema on the Planetary Frontier (University of California Press, 2027)
• Occupying Habits: Everyday Media and Warfare in Israel\Palestine (Bloomsbury Press, 2023)
• Desert Mirages: Finding Common Grounds between Erasure and Overexposure, In Media Fields. Issue 18, 2024.
• Red Planets: Cinema, desert and extraction. Afterimage Journal. UC Press. March 2022.
• Rambo in the Dead Lands: Cinema, War and Landscape. Screen Journal\Oxford Press, 2020.
• I am Spartacus: Individualising Visual Media and Warfare. Media, Culture & Society. January 2019.
• Spectacle as Camouflage: How the IDF Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Visible Evidence. World Records Journal. March 2019.