"A polyphonic meditation on time and urban space" (Sukhdev Sandhu, BFI 2012).
"If you let it, a street will grow" says a voice in this film-poem which offers a lyrical, painterly defence of the everyday and a celebration of multiculturalism, even as it poses questions about the process of regeneration.
Shot on location in the London Borough of Hackney, the film interweaves rarely seen archive, super 16mm and super 8mm photography. Slow, still shots of streets, parks, cemeteries and markets are juxtaposed with the East London paintings of Leon Kossoff, Jock McFadyen and James MacKinnon.
With a script based on poet, Michael Rosen's play for voices, a heightened soundscape mixes documentary with poetry, music, song and location recordings. As we slip between past and present, real and imagined, famous and unknown "the world comes to Hackney": From Shakespeare in Shoreditch, to a Jamaican builder, from an 18th Century feminist abolitionist to a Turkish barber, from Anna Sewell's "Black Beauty" to the Jewish 43 Group taking on Oswald Mosley in Dalston, the audience is invited to apprehend the city as fragmentary and multi-layered, "past in the present, present in the past."
did I? explores amnesia and the devastation of severe memory loss through a series of abstract visual sequences. The work combines live action footage with hand drawn and 3D animation to evoke a sense of the fragmentary and disordered recollections of an amnesiac.
Based on the opening passage from Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics, a book which, amongst other queer characters, describes ornamental hermits, Sutcliffe uses George Harrison’s album cover from “All things Must Pass” as a visual counterpoint to a choral rendition of Sitwell’s text.
20 Hz observes a geo-magnetic storm occurring in the Earth's upper atmosphere. Working with data collected from the CARISMA radio array and interpreted as audio, we hear tweeting and rumbles caused by incoming solar wind, captured at the frequency of 20 Hertz. (Available in 3D version )
Body of War reflects how a man becomes a soldier through relentless repetition of acts of violence. The psyche of a human as he learns to integrate the willingness to kill. The Normandy Landing setting, testimonies of former soldiers. Body of War shows human intimacy and the brutality of war.
Shot on a remote Scottish island to an ambient and musical sound track, capturing the contrasting (Coimeas) textures and ambiance of the Shore line as an audio visual poem.
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.
Marion is a former actress who has committed murder. She is put in to a institute and slowly we discover she has Multiple person Disorder. Marion has over 30 different personalities each personality is played by a different actor there is one main actor playing the real Marion. With her mind in jepordy all Marion has left is her talent to escape
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.
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.
