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Vertical Shapes in a Horizontal Landscape
Mark JenkinA walk through England's south coast evokes the artists who lived and worked there.
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A walk through England's south coast evokes the artists who lived and worked there.
Playful meditation upon landscape, colour and the process of collaborative filmmaking. As two artists battle the inclement Cornish weather they discuss Derek Jarman, the golden light and the magic of the craggy coastline.
A vision of transatlantic commonality
A relentless dream of ektachromatic consciousness, spanning two decades of black and white 'progress' in a single urgent synaptic utterance - this transcendent electronic beat poem leaps impossibly between the end of the line, then and now, moving inexorably towards the vanishing point of its own spontaneous entropy.
Stoltz constructed Pinktoned and Pinktoned (Exploded View) using footage of passersby he filmed from his art studio in East Hollywood interspersed with still images from an archive of photographic slides he found at a rummage sale at the Echo Park Film Center. These images picture the streets of Los Angeles covered with wheat-pasted movie posters for Underground, a 1976 documentary about the Weather Underground.
A personal account of Black community spaces in the UK, focusing on Caribbean diaspora. By visiting the site of the former Keskidee Centre that is now luxury apartments, the film considers the conditions which allowed this historical space to thrive. 'Okay Keskidee' explores the reasons why gathering in physical space is difficult because of the premium cost of space and the often free labour or government funding needed, both of which are scarce. We see the architecture of surrounding developments driven by rampant capitalism. Can the digital realm replace a physical community presence and produce an accessible archive for a new generation? 'Okay Keskidee, Let Me See Inside', is part of a larger body of work into Caribbean diaspora lives in the UK. I feel it is important to show that histories of arts organising go hand in hand with political discourse. My approach to the work is underpinned by PhD research into Black artists using analogue film. My interest in using 16mm is in the value of the medium when the Keskidee Centre was operational in the 70's and 80's, and I have focused on making new images which take the form of the dominant newsreel medium at the time, 16mm film. The central proposition of the film is that a surface could stand in for the inadequate recording of Black histories. The labour of making the film is also important, (as is the labour of these Caribbean artistic practices discussed in the film). By using optical printing and rostrum cameras at two film labs in the UK, I am interested in slow ways of thinking around contemporary subjects and the personal connections formed by using machines which are now usurped by faster and more convenient digital practices.
The Other Spring follows a young woman's return to her hometown decades after a destructive flood, where spectral encounters draw her into the town's layered past. Drawing together historical and imagined worlds, the film meditates on remembering, storytelling and filmmaking as intertwined acts of interpretation.
Originating from Sophie Sabet's short film of the same name, this exhibition revisits a moment of political and familial rupture to investigate how structures of power in political crises cause residual alienation across temporalities, lineages, and geographies. Return of the Bright Night mines the gaps and fissures within memories and migration, tracing the past in order to negotiate the present.
In 1991, on the outskirts of Tenja, Josip Reihl Kir - the chief of the Osijek Police Department, a man dedicated to negotiations and avoiding war - was assassinated. Peacemaker is a story about the last few months of his life, in the dawn of the bloodthirsty Croatian-Serbian war, which Kir had been trying hard to prevent, told through the statements of a few witnesses and archive materials from the era. Still today, after over 30 years, many elements of that assassination remain unclear and the possible contractors - still unknown. Filmmaker Ivan Ramljak is one of the most significant Croatian author of documentaries, recognizable for his particular approach to historic issues.
Veiroj weaves a dialogue from diverse sources: his 30-year personal archive, film excerpts, and images from a psychiatric hospital where his father received his diagnosis. These images dissect complex family and relational experiences.
The titular Daughter of Nectar of Pang-Chuan Huang and Chunni Lin's quietly magisterial feature debut is a 1921 sculpture by Taiwanese sculptor Huang Tu-Shui, whose early-20th-century studies led him to Japan, but whose relations with his home nation's former colonizer made him a postwar pariah and forced his work into near-obscurity. As it revisits Huang's refined practice—and questions of nationalism and arts education in the era more broadly—the film elegantly folds in the present day, including footage of contemporary students working on projects at Huang Tu-Shui's alma mater, and the 2021 unveiling of the Daughter after 47 years in storage. Shot on tactile 16mm, deeply rhythmic in construction, and accented by subtle in-camera effects, Daughter of Nectar is intimate and grand.
NOVA 78 resurrects the electrifying atmosphere of the Nova Convention of 1978 through restored, never-before-seen archival footage featuring icons like William S. Burroughs, Frank Zappa, and Patti Smith—reimagined as a vibrant cinematic event for contemporary audiences .
Poet, agricultural engineer and revolutionary Amílcar Cabral was born in Guinea-Bissau to Cape Verdean parents. After studying in Portugal, he emerged as the charismatic leader of the anti-colonial struggle against Portuguese rule. With his utopian ideas, he sparked a cultural and an armed uprising that went on to inspire other African liberation movements.
His poetry, letters to his two successive wives, and political pamphlets form the basis of a journal-like film narrative. Associative atmospheric images with a charged soundtrack are interwoven with police reports and archival footage. A layered portrait gradually emerges of a visionary who could be both diplomatic and ruthless.
As the dream of a free Guinea-Bissau and unity with Cape Verde draws ever closer, the threat also increases, not only from the Portuguese army and secret service, but also from undermining forces within Cabral's own party. This culminates in the question: who was behind his assassination in 1973? A portrait encompassing interracial love, ambition, terror and betrayal.
Powwow People is a radically immersive, durational portrait and cinematic celebration of a contemporary powwow by Sky Hopinka, one of the most vital artists working today.
An enchanting film about an entire British village reenacting the myth of the Holy Grail over the course of a year. A striking debut film with enormous imaginative power.
Sampling waterside vistas from the Pearl River to Victoria Harbour, the film unfolds as a scroll across the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area. Infra-sensory vibrations become reverberant layers, sensing the distance produced by total interconnection.
Abandoned houses, surviving objects that carry memory. Exiled from Iran after her film on the 2009 Green Movement was banned, a filmmaker breaks her family's decades-long silence about a disappeared cousin, executed during the 1988 purges in Iran's political prisons. Grappling with estrangement and loss, she uses fragments, archives, and the images made during her years of diaristic filming in Iran to reflect on the collective taboo, the fear that silenced the population for so many years, and the explosion of resistance that continues to grow within Iranian society today.
The film travels at the pace of the seasons through the real and fictional story of a region in Portugal, the Alentejo, and the peoples who have lived there. It begins at a present with no memory and travels back in time to the immemorial time, before the invention of writing. Along the way, it crosses more or less distant pasts: the work and life of German archaeologists detained far away from home during WWII, through their archives and letters; the occupation of the land by the rural workers after the revolution in April 1974; stories kept in the collective memory. During this journey we meet women and men, old people and children, shepherds, hunters, beekeepers, archaeologist, teachers and storytellers, and also ruins, dolmens and a thousand-year old olive tree. All contribute, with their memories, believes and knowledge, to compose a poetic, political, multi-layered and polyphonic portrait of the region
Los Angeles, 2028. Just before the Summer Olympics. A livestock virus is taking out all meat and poultry, at the same time there is a cockroach infestation across the city. It's a perfect storm for a new business opportunity as society is forced to consider a new source of protein. Two young men, petty thieves some might call them, hatch a plan, as the confined urban spaces around them reveal and conceal an atmosphere brimming with paranoia and simmering rage. Charlotte Zhang's feature directorial debut is an impressionistic act of resistance in the form of a nocturnal noir with no wave punk energy. The absence of a social safety net is the everyday reality for these working-class Angelenos, brown bodies that inhabit private spaces of concrete and chrome as ICE raids, helicopters, the threat of police and eco-disasters close in around them. Cars become the sites of rage and animating vitality. This state of dispossession is punctured by an allusive collage of images, layered dialogues, intertitles and 1950s doo-wop music.
"It seems to be the time to consider bridges." – James Benning
An intimate, unconventional portrait of fashion designer Marc Jacobs, guided through decades of friendship and creative collaboration with Sofia Coppola—his longtime friend, muse, and creative partner.
The death of his son causes McElwee, an autobiographical filmmaker, to look back on his life's work. He eventually turns to his archive of home movies. To what extent did his camera affect their relationship when Adrian was alive? To what extent does it define that relationship now that he is gone? Meanwhile, an effort to adapt McElwee's first feature, Sherman's March, into a work of fiction lurches along, giving the filmmaker another perspective from which to meditate on movie making and mortality.
Five young brothers drive the streets of Phnom Penh each night in search of venues to perform their break-dancing routine to earn something to support their family.
Shayma' was six years old when the Second Intifada broke out. More than twenty years later, she opens a box of old videotapes that starts her search for memories. In voice-over she addresses her mother, who says she is blessed with a poor memory. Shayma', by contrast, still remembers exactly what she wore on her first day of school: her new school uniform with a lace collar and a white bow in her hair. She also remembers spying her birthday cake through a crack in the kitchen door of their house, which had been confiscated by Israeli soldiers.
These glimpses into an intimate world are contrasted with stark images of the city, including scenes of tanks blocking the streets of Hebron, endless checkpoints, houses being destroyed, the wounded and the dead, and children playing among the rubble and trees.
Personal memories and collective trauma intertwine to form a powerful portrait of a childhood lived under occupation, offering a perspective on the present and the future. The film is dedicated to Shayma's mother, who taught her to cherish the scent of almond blossoms in spring, and to all the mothers of Palestine.
Henri Laborit's thoughts taken from Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard shooting Notre musique, a song by Fairuz: just some of the materials in this essay-tribute to the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich.
Spring equinox 2024: 20 March at three hours, six minutes, twenty-one seconds (GMT). Vattetot-sur-mer, in the Pays-de-Caux region of Normandy, Gaza is being bombed.
Muddy Currents goes back to the literal source of Israeli domination in the settlements in Palestine. Starting with the capture of water, artist Shadi Habib Allah explores how a people is deprived of its natural and basic resources, formally asking the question: how do we represent the lack of what is necessary?
A calling inhabits the blank pages, unfolding a secret writing of hers. The unseen written traces seep from the murmuring land, pushing through fragmented voices to become new forms—beings made material. Framed as a dialogue with my grandmother, this film explores an alternative form of personal writing by Chinese women in the context of major political events—one that is both absent and abundant. The 'blank' becomes an image, carrying a search for agency: of land transformed, of women unheard, of voids rewritten. By breaking down linguistic structures, the film opens a space for imagining, reading, and performing, allowing for emergence. —Xiao Zhang
In the claustrophobic depths of the Mutoshi mine in Katanga (DRC), Ndjimu follows The Rememberers – a community labouring in unsafe and brutal conditions to extract coveted minerals from the ancestral soils to feed global tech empires, to their own detriment. Set to a soundtrack of metallic rock being crushed, Ndjimu is an invocation and a descent into the earth's memory, beneath the noise of extraction and the myth of progress.
A buzzing, kinetic companion piece to his Festival feature Rose of Nevada, Mark Jenkin stitches together and riffs on Super 8 fragments from his travels through the lens of cinema — both his own and others — literature, and folk tales.
The film stages a fictional trial around the 2010 Bangkok massacre, blending witness testimony with the filmmaker's research. A meditation on truth and justice in the absence of official accountability.
An elegant and thought-provoking film shot in graceful black-and-white images that move from room to room in an exploration of location, architecture, and monuments.