Projects in categories: Artist Project and Video / Experimental

Synopsis

A special combined presentation of three of James Richards’ recent works (2006-2014) that recycle and adapt a diverse range of material to produce a spectral meditation on the human figure as a space of sensual integration, inspired by the work of the late filmmaker Derek Jarman.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Experiementa Strand

Synopsis

Artist Tacita Dean, and actor Stephen Dillane presented a live theatrical happening performed over four nights at the 2014 Sydney Biennial, with two 16mm cameras rolling on each occasion. Dillane changed elements of his appearance each night and, snatching pages from Dean who was seated in the front row, recited Shakespeare, popular texts and personal stories, whilst also announcing adjustments in the camera set-ups and the changing of reels. Dean has returned to this tense scenario and cut into the material according to the systemic logic that emerged over the course of the serialised performance, inscribing changes in time and space, illustrating or actualising a form of deep choreography- LFF
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Experiementa Strand

Synopsis

Based on the bestselling cult novel by Tom McCarthy, the plot follows a young man who tries to reconstruct his past out of fragmented memories. His obsessive efforts are funded by a large financial settlement for an accident he cannot remember, but neither his friends nor he can anticipate the extremes he will go to in realising his quest.
BFI London Film Festival 2015 - World premiere

Synopsis

Through a series of oral testimonies and carefully composed portraits, Alone Together, the Social Life of Benches explores how individuals and groups spend time in two distinctive public London locations.

Made by Esther Johnson as part of an Arts & Humanities Research Council project, this poetic documentary illuminates the thoughts and memories of frequent users of General Gordon Square, Woolwich, and St Helier Open Space, Sutton.

Revolving around the micro-space of the humble bench, the film incorporates contributions from a diverse range of visitors. These testimonies highlight themes such as the psychological feeling of being in a space, the rhythm and flow of visitors to a place, the importance of design for everyday street furniture and access to communal outdoor space.

The film acts like a stranger who joins you to ‘watch the world go by’, and to break the ice by starting a conversation with their fellow bench user.

Synopsis

A homage to 1960s gothic fantasy, and Italian and Japanese horror, Black Woods at Sundown's cautionary tale follows a girl's serene summer afternoon, as it descends into psychedelic nightmare.

Synopsis

Exploring the intangibility of how one experiences and records the present through bodily sensations, referencing Marcel Proust’s notion of ‘Involuntary Memory’.
The residual, the soil and stains aren’t mere reconstruction of the past but an attempt to return to ritualise fragments of the absent. The desire to remember, embeds the past involuntarily within the present.

Synopsis

Using the metaphor of the Stoneymollan Trail, a hiking trail out of Glasgow, the film explores Charlotte Prodger’s personal archive, with material from multiple formats that includes an archive of miniDV tapes that Prodger shot between 1999 and 2004, recent footage shot on her iPhone and HD camera, and screenprinted graphic forms. The resulting single-screen video piece is a meditation on memory, subjectivity and desire.
BFI London Film Festival 2015 - World premiere

Synopsis

Shot on the otherworldly beaches of Morocco in silvery black-and-white 16mm Scope 'A Distant Episode' transforms behind-the-scenes footage into a dreamy film fragments depicting sci-fi incursions into a mythic landscape.
Official Selection Toronto 2015 - Wavelengths

Synopsis

Shot in Paris, São Paulo and Toronto, acclaimed Canadian contemporary artist Mark Lewis’ essay film captures the ever-changing textures of these cities through moving images of glass, light, shadows and reflections. Offering an homage to the city symphony films of the 1920s, whilst juxtaposing modernist architecture with the compositional structures of old master paintings.
Toronto International Film Festival 2015 - World premiere

Synopsis

This installation piece is the first major collaboration between British artist Corin Sworn and Canadian artist Tony Romano.
'La Giubba' follows the intersections of five drifters over the course of two summer days in southern Italy. A young Albanian man and his daughter search for a swimming coach who fled their homeland in the 1990s, but instead find an Arbëresh community settled by their countrymen 600 years earlier. Two theatre actors take on a dubious commission to increase audiences in the rural south and traverse the landscape fashioning little theatres of belief, until a Canadian interloper turns up. Employing professional and amateur actors, 'La Giubba' situates its nomadic characters within both the stunning Italian landscape and the history inscribed upon it, visible and unseen.
Official Selection Toronto 2015 - Wavelengths

Synopsis

Inspired by William Gaddis’s novel "JR", 'Solo for Rich Man' restages a quintet of performance pieces (including one by Fluxus artist George Maciunas) from a four-day experimental music workshop for children conceived by artist and filmmaker Beatrice Gibson and renowned cellist Anton Likoszevieze.
Official Selection Toronto 2015 - Wavelengths

Synopsis

From the far west of Cornwall comes a contemporary moral tale of love, lust, birth, death, infidelity, murder, revenge, redemption...and the housing crisis.

Shot on a clockwork camera, on 16mm black & white negative stock, and processed by hand using an instant coffee based developer.