Projects in categories: Artist Project and Video / Experimental

Synopsis

Inspired by real people, debut filmmaker Leah Stipic brings us Darkest Before Dawn: a thought-provoking, experimental short film. Combining live and animation in a graphic novel style, this tour-de-force is visually stunning, surreal and dream-like. The film tells the story of a heroin addict on the brink of losing himself to his addiction. As dusk falls upon the city he meets others who have also fallen on hard times and decides to fight for a second chance as he realises that oftentimes, one needs to fall into the darkest depths of the night before seeing the light at dawn.

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With each of its 54 shots recorded on a different day, this silent portrait of a window cleaner uncovers the kind of beauty that is indeed everyday and all around us, but which can also remain strangely obscured by the temporality of living itself.

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A team is at work dissecting what appears to be an ordinary bush. The examination is carried out with such conviction and reverence, towards something which is seemingly so mundane, that the whole process appears quite absurd.   Filmed during a Gulbenkian Galapagos Artists Residency.

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King Dong offers a vhs-tinted glimpse into the mind of comedy filmmaking obscurity Len Cella, who for forty years has strove to make the lowest-brow films and videos with all the seriousness of an auteur.

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A teenage boy uses his hearing impairment to escape his daily routine and the responsibility of looking after his wheelchair bound little brother.

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A boy is looking for love. His goal is to find an interesting, pretty and smart girl who makes he feel in love. The special one, his dream girl. For this reason, he will meet with three different girls in three different places.

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The latest film by Frame on Frame was made in the style of Mike Leigh and Alexander Sokurov. It is an exceptional piece of experimental film-making and was shot from beginning to end in less than 100 minutes, using 6 cameras strategically placed in a large private garden in Hammersmith. Twenty-four actors took part and although they worked to a plot, all the dialogue was improvised during the shoot with no rehearsals beforehand. Only Morrison was made aware of the final scene before the shoot.

Synopsis

Robinson in Ruins is an account of a journey by a wandering, erratic scholar, through landscapes in the south of England. Its fictional narration begins: 'When a man called Robinson was released from Edgcott open prison, he made his way to the nearest city, and looked for somewhere to haunt'. Robinson ‘believed he could communicate with a network of non-human intelligences determined to preserve the possibility of life’s survival on the planet’ and ‘was equipped with an ancient ciné camera, with which he made images of his everyday surroundings’. He surveyed the centre of the island on which he was shipwrecked: 'The location,' he wrote, 'of a Great Malady, that I shall dispel, in the manner of Turner, by making picturesque views, on journeys to sites of scientific and historic interest.' The film consists of these views. The cinematography began in January 2008 and continued until November, just after the peak of that year’s global banking crisis. The film’s unplanned journey ‘rediscovers’ several locations associated with capitalism’s development since the 16th century and resistance to it. Vanessa Redgrave’s narration includes references to the deepening economic crisis, climate change and mass-extinction, but manages to reach an optimistic conclusion.

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Slow Action is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film which exists somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction. Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography - the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat - to a conception of the Earth in the distant future, when the sea level has risen to absurd heights, forming new isolated archipelagos. Accounts from a great library of Utopias are read by two voices.

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One morning. Two points of view. Will today be the day? Laura desperately hopes so. Otherwise it's just another morning dealing with Alice, her overbearing mother. A film that weaves oil-painted animation with live-action film, to peel back the layers of consciousness and reveal one family's dark history.

Synopsis

The Unnameable is an 11 minute artists’ film trading in popular culture, sci-fi, cinema and horror. The title is a reference to both HP Lovecraft and Samuel Beckett's "Unnameables"; stories that melt in and out of reality and psychosis. Their characters fear what they know and also what eludes them. The Unnameable was filmed in an abandoned nursery for disabled children in west London.

Synopsis

Expressed via abstraction and aggressive editing, 4 chapters of unspeakable portrays an instability in self-image and emotions alongside impulsive behaviour, via changes in appearance of the artist and the shape of the frame.