Projects in categories: Artist Project and Video / Experimental

Synopsis

The Hippies were a bizarre English punk band formed in '79 by the Hulse children, Toby (12), Matt (11) and Polly (8). Their cassette album 'A Sound for the Future' featured songs about disease, assassination and the Antarctic. "Stop eating toast and singeing your legs by the gas fire. Get up and do something!" (Ruth Pendragon, Mother, Manager, Guru), 1979. The Hippies performed ticketed live shows for their mother’s kindly but chaotic group of Cambridge friends; the homeless, drunks, animal rights activists, junkies, cross-dressers and gay Franciscan friars. The Hippies then and now. What truly happened back in the past and whose side of the story should be told? Especially as the film’s director was the band's 11-year-old drummer? Matt’s mum Ruth, maverick, mystic, manager, plays a pivotal role in the bigger picture, offering an insight into a time of personal and social upheaval, both for her and her family in Thatcher’s Britain. Using music of the period, archive, animation and poetic reimaginings of key moments, Matt Hulse explores a part-remembered, kaleidoscopically fractured, family history, through an energetic, jarring, ride; part performance, part art, part process, post-punk.

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A man is found drowned in a few inches of water. His only ID is his tattoo.

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Bill Clinton’s strange legacy as President of the United States and ringmaster of the 1990s is a confounding mess of public amnesia, nostalgia, and scorn. WILLIAM JEFFERSON WILDERNESS is a personal exploration that legacy, and of the tangled process of consigning a former political hero to history. DOK Leipzig • International Competition • World Premiere St. Louis International Film Festival • Official Selection Florida Film Festival • Sunspots: New Visions of the Avant Garde

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By presenting a poetic expression of the interrelationship between the artist and the inspiration of flowers as a dynamic artistic sensibility, FLOWER DUET is exploring sustainability and global warming issues through this experimental hand-painted (pastel/water colour) animated poem film from the director’s artist point of view.

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This film follows a personal and intimate journey exploring the repression experienced by the filmmaker during her childhood when she faced sexual control in Damascus. Through the creative use of family archive mixed with current footage of her body she reconstructs the pain of the past absorbed by her body.

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A rumination on the cause and effect of climate change, using the medium of the collage film, and accompanied by a strong degree of musical counterpoint.

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A semi-fictional documentary about the so-called 'new frontier' of deep sea mining. A robotics engineer and a marine biologist speculate on a near future in which prospectors have turned to the deep ocean commons. There lies prized mineral deposits, five thousand metres below the surface, which could provide all the base metals needed for our future smartphones, smart cars and renewable energies like solar panels and wind farms. Yet siren songs forewarn shipwreck...

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INFINITY MINUS INFINITY draws on several inspirations: the modernist verse of the Jamaican poet Una Marson, the alluvial invocations of the Martiniquan philosopher and poet Edouard Glissant, the black feminist poetics of the Brazilian philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva and the racial formation of geology theorised by British geographer Kathryn Yusoff to dramatise an audio-visual experiment in choreo-poetics. INFINITY MINUS INFINITY brings together dance, music, recital and digital animation to compose a transhistorical zone in which the unpayable debts of racial capitalism cannot be separated from the ongoing crimes of capitalogenic climate catastrophe. Infinity minus Infinity enacts the durational timelines of past distress, present duress and future dread through the assembly of a chorus of trans-temporal deities whose utterances, expressions, gestures and movements personify the compounded, accumulated, irreparable times and spaces of the hostile environment. The phrase ‘hostile environment’ invokes the covert policy of targeting migrants enacted by the Conservative government since 2014. It stands for the criminalisation of the Afro-Caribbean women and men that migrated to Britain in the 1950s to help reconstruct its industrial infrastructure. The effort to detain and deport these women and men of the Windrush generation – so called because they followed in the wake of the men that emigrated to Britain from the Caribbean on board the SS Empire Windrush in 1948 – reveals the British state’s commitment to disarticulating the forms of attachment and belonging of Afro-Caribbean settlement that helped decolonize the British empire from within. Infinity minus Infinity extends the policy of the ongoing hostile environment backward and forward in an inter-scalar movement between times and spaces that dramatises Saidiya V. Hartman’s formulation of the afterlife of slavery within a choreography of what Christina Sharpe calls anti-blackness as total climate. (RCA) Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2020 - Forum Expanded - International premiere

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Forensic Architecture meticulously reconstruct an accident involving a boat full of migrants close to the European coast. The work is based on video material recorded by artist and survivor Amel Alzakout as the boat was sinking. Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2020 - Forum Expanded - World premiere

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The Outer Hebrides was long ago once thought of as a place of seers, who were known to have the gift of Second Sight: an ability to foretell future events. These prognostications were revealed to the seer in the form of visions or otherworldly sounds. Sometimes they took the form of portents derived by augury read from animals, bones, or weather patterns foretelling what has yet come to pass. Using these stories as a starting point, THE TWO SIGHTS, is a portrait of a rapidly changing maritime environment with its acoustic ecology and culture in flux in a time of uncertain futures. Long take Super 16mm cinematography, interwoven with site-specific field recordings and interviews collected from the disappearing oral histories of several Hebridean communities are collaged to explore the relationship between place narrative, environment, and the reciprocal influences they exact upon one another. Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2020 - Forum - World premiere

Synopsis

The title is borrowed from a recent book which discusses the effect of the use of the internet on peoples emotions i.e. body image, general existential issues etc . I consider the work in terms of assemblage as currently understood in contemporary philosophy and literature. (Richard O'Callaghan)

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An exploration of mental health in the drag community, centred around NYC drag queen Blackie O.