The actual generation of video search engines offers low-level abstractions of the data while users seek for high-level semantics. The main challenge in video retrieval remains bridging the semantic gap. Thus, the effectiveness of video retrieval is based on the result of the interaction between query selection and a goal-oriented human user. The system exploits the human capability for rapidly scanning imagery augmenting it with an active learning loop, which tries to always present the most relevant material based on the current information. We describe in this paper, a machine learning system for interactive video retrieval. The core of this system is a kernel-based SVM classifier. The video retrieval uses the core as an active learning classifier. We perform an experiment against the 2005 NIST TRECVID benchmark in the high-level task.