Projects in categories: Artist Project and Video / Experimental

Synopsis

Two trans people and their journey to learning to love their bodies.
A film about the effects hormones can have on your body as a trans person. Mainstream narratives often sensationalise the experiences of trans people with medical interventions, but this film explores the issue of hormones in more depth, in an honest, bold and vulnerable way.

Synopsis

On survival and transformation inspired by Catherine Lord’s memoir 'The Summer of Her Baldness' a moving and irreverent account of her experience of breast cancer and the chemically induced devastation of chemotherapy. This piece draws into focus the intersection of queer identity, cross-generational dialogue, illness, and the fine line between alternately poisonous and curative substances.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2017 - Experimenta Strand

Synopsis

A study of the transformation of asbestos extraction from the earth to extraction from the walls. In this piece the artists ask how both filming and the use of found footage can be thought of as forms of extraction: extracting images from forms and from contexts.
Mined, extracted, and woven, asbestos was the magic mineral. Towns became cities under its patronage, Persian kings entertained guests with its fireproof nature, and centuries of industry raked in the profits of its global application. We now live in the remains of this toxic dream, a dream that with the invention of electron microscopes revealed our material history as a disaster in waiting. Yet the asbestos industry has far from left us, with extraction from the soil transforming to extraction from our walls. We are now faced with two options: to remove this material from our homes and start anew, or to build upon its residue. Removal is a dangerous and costly operation. So often we choose to live amongst it instead, choking out our walls with plastic tarping: the failed promises of modernism literally entombed all around us.
Shot in the mining township of Asbestos, Quebec, home to the world’s largest asbestos mine, that only stopped extraction in 2012, the film is a meditation on the entanglement of the fragility of bodies, the nonlinearity of progress, and the persistence of matter. (Sasha Litvintseva and Graeme Arnfield)
Official Selection Berlinale 2017 - Forum Expanded

Synopsis

Atom Spirit explores the increased interconnectedness of advanced technology and nature within the age of the Anthropocene. The film is set in Trinidad and Tobago, in a location that serves as a nexus point where desire, ecology and queerness intersect.

Atom Spirit is a film that reconceptualises our relationships with the environment, non-human animals and each other. Shedding scientific taxonomies and building queer ecologies in their stead, the film considers the possibility and necessity for new means of being in the world.

Synopsis

Channeling the medium of knitting through film, 'Avoiding Green' explores this ancient craft as an early form of digital construction. Combining archive footage, interviews and ‘depth camera’ animation it explores the symbolic role that knitting took in the definition of gender stereotypes from the mid 20th Century onward.

Synopsis

SLEEPING IN PUBLIC is a new collaborative moving image commission, collaborating with writer Ellen Wilkinson for Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.
Captured at night in Bristol, the video work shows details of empty spaces: functional but overlooked parts of the city that in daylight would be populated by people working. In these dark images people are distantly present: a blurry figure passes behind a semi-opaque loading bay door; chairs wait for sitters to return; discarded paper cups are lit by the blue flashes of an emergency siren; someone wearing a high visibility jacket pauses in the centre of a car park.
The measured – perhaps weary – voice of the European narrator describes workers in a warehouse of artificial plants and flowers. Without a defined beginning and end, this looping video reflects the repetitive nature of the daily work that many of us do, depicting workplace hierarchies and the subtle ways in which people's behaviour is controlled.

Synopsis

2018: neo-fascism has taken over. The government implements a programme to chip the population of the UK. Eloise, a documentary film-maker, suspects she is being brainwashed by a secret government organisation.

Synopsis

In 1977, immigration divides Britain. What happens when a punk fanzine challenges the status quo?
Official Selection Sundance Film Festival 2017 - International Documentary Short Film Selection - World premiere

Synopsis

A young filmmaker questions how he connects to his emotions, by talking to a stranger online who can’t feel any. This stranger (Robert) suffers from 'Alexithymia', which is a condition most simply described as ‘Emotional Blindness’, it’s the inability to identify and describe emotions in the self.

Synopsis

Juxtaposing images of the production sites of the pharmaceutical-chemical industry with speculations on the historical, social, and material conditions of Cyanotype photography, in this piece artist Kerstin Schroedinger probes into the (gendered) politics of materiality and the (violent) historicities of its form.
The film follows a figure that proceeds through the stages of exposing and developing a Cyanotype. They revisit sites in Seveso, Italy, and Basel, Switzerland that both relate directly to the history of Prussian Blue, a blue synthetic dye.
Official Selection Berlinale 2018 - Forum Expanded Exhibition - "A Mechanism Capable of Changing Itself" - Group exhibition at Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg

Synopsis

A short, animated film about the interior of an 'iceberg' home (a home where the sub-ground levels are larger than the house above). The iceberg home in question was not developed due to hundreds of objections from surrounding neighbours in Knightsbridge, West London.
CONSTRUCTION LINES shows this iceberg home rendered as a 3D model, using the original architectural plans and the software ‘Sketchup’. The narrative of the film, the model of the home, and the scenes played out within it, are informed by the objections filed against the planning application, as well as online articles speculating about the lives and lifestyles of the super-rich.
Official Selection at Aesthetica Short Film Festival 2017 - World premiere
Official Selection Hamburg International Short Film Festival 2018 - Deframed Competition - International premiere

Synopsis

Acclaimed visual artist Jon Rafman presents a nightmare vision of a disturbing a computer-generated world.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2017 - Cult Strand