Projects in categories: Artist Project and Video / Experimental

Synopsis

25 voices from 16 countries, respond to an invitation to express their view for a new world, in a poetic documentary that explores, and acknowledges, the importance of personal viewpoint and individual ideologies of hope, and for change.

Synopsis

Popular culture depicts "a bride" as something most women aspire to be one day; a status celebrated with a glamorous day shared with family/friends. This piece delves beneath the surface and explores beauty, trepidation, loneliness, purity, sexuality, sadness, commitment and many more themes we wouldn't associate with the word "bride".

Synopsis

'Normal Behaviour will be resumed after the break...' But what is ‘normal’ when you split up with someone? You try hard to forget them. Everyone encourages you to get over them. But do you really want to get over them? How can you find a balance between forgetting and remembering?

Synopsis

Frantz Fanon was a revolutionary, writer and psychiatrist, whose classic publications 'The Wretched of the Earth' (1961) and 'Black Skin White Mask' (1952) became founding texts of the decolonization movement. This film examines Fanon's theories of identity and race, and traces his involvement in the independence struggle in Algeria. Digitally remastered in 2K through the BFI Unlocking Film Heritage programme. Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2017 - Experimenta Strand - 2K Restoration World premiere

Synopsis

Memory mixes with desire as a museum attendant is caught up in sado-masochistic fantasies inspired by a 19th Century painting of slaves in chains called 'Scene on the Coast of Africa'. The man remembers his past as a singer and delivers Dido's lament from Purcell's opera. Official Selection Berlinale 2019 - Panorama 40

Synopsis

Mona Hatoum left Beirut in 1975 for a short visit to London. When war broke out in the Lebanon she found it impossible to return. In this video, letters from her mother in Beirut, written in Arabic, move across the screen. They are read aloud, in English, by the artist. Hatoum's mother is also heard, speaking openly about her feelings and sexuality, accompanied by images of her in the shower. Hatoum's video suggests exile and displacement. She has said it also challenges 'the stereotype of Arab women as passive, mother as non-sexual being'.

Synopsis

Young men find themselves scattered and defencelessly exposed to a merciless sun. Their gaze moves off searchingly into the distance. Deserted places appear to offer vague promises of refuge. On a prison wall, an explosive image of desire emerges, full of hope for freedom. Constantine Giannaris relishes in mixing light and colour with the textures of Super 8 and video footage to express the thoughts of the poet Jean Genet. Greatly affected by the AIDS epidemic, he addresses the desire for love as well as the threat of isolation and death in a restless cinematographic delirium. Official Selection Berlinale 2019 - Panorama 40

Synopsis

In their seminal, intersectional first feature, directors Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien incisively interrogate Black British experience, fusing dramatic scenes of family life with documentary and mystical elements, to give richly imaginative witness to a ‘post-colonial’ identity that encompasses generational, class, sexual and gender differences. Vividly manipulated footage of urban unrest, police brutality, gay rights marches and the miners’ strike, alongside chopped-up sequences showing a buzzing London night life, are intertwined, creating a penetrating example of Sankofa’s disruptive critique of 1980s Britain. And it looks fantastic. The film screens in a simultaneous transatlantic premiere with the New York Film Festival. (London Film Festival)

Synopsis

An epicene angel flutters its wings and smokes a cigarette in this ejaculatory study of frustration, torment, stupidity and insolence. With Cerith Wyn Evans as the angel and music by Michael Nyman. Made at the Royal College of Art in 1985.

Synopsis

British filmmaker John Akomfrah imagines the lives of a black man and woman who appear in a sixteenth-century drawing by German Renaissance master Albrecht Dürer (TIFF 2012).

Synopsis

An abstract look at daily life in London. A restoration by Cinémathèque Suisse of an unfinished version of Hans Richter's EVERY DAY (1929), found at the archives of the Cinémathèque in 2012. Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Treasures Strand