I Could Read the Sky a film about music, madness memory, love and loss, a haunting story of immigration.
I Could Read the Sky is adapted from the photographic novel of the same name which has been recently published to rave reviews and explores the sense of identity, loss and exile. It is the moving story of an old man living in a bedsit in London, remembering his life, growing up on the West coast of Ireland and his journey to London.
The film unravels the strange twisting drama of a working man's life. It moves from a decaying rural past to a vividly modern present, driven by a dynamic music soundtrack that draws from both, and a simple flowing lyrical story telling. It is the state of memory that the film evokes, not memory as re-enactment but as texture. The film gets to the essence of how we remember. Memory as fragments, as details and layers, memory that comes at you out of the dark. From behind closed eyes, with its abstractions of light and form and sudden moments of precise clarity, taking us on an inward, visually extraordinary labyrinthine journey to the film's end.
The film stars the acclaimed Irish writer Dermot Healy and includes cameos from actors Maria Doyle Kennedy, Brendan Coyle and Stephen Rea, writer Pat McCabe (Butcher Boy) and the author Timothy O'Grady and photographer Steve Pyke.
In King Hayle I the camera navigates around a statue of Emperor Haile Sellassie I, acting as a pivotal device to which spectators visually anchor themselves. King Hayle I is an attempt at repairing the umbilical cord between the praxis of art, life and spirituality . . .
A woman travels both physically and literally in an interior space of several rooms. The film explores the space between self present cohesion and split subjectivity. The fantastical merges with claustrophobic domestical ritual.
A young woman treks around a London park on a Summers day. Hit and miss meetings ensue while her ruminations on life and dreams may not stand up in the pedestrian chaos. Can she figure fantasy from reality? Is the journey better than arrival?
Frantz Fanon was a revolutionary, writer and psychiatrist, whose classic publications 'The Wretched of the Earth' (1961) and 'Black Skin White Mask' (1952) became founding texts of the decolonization movement. This film examines Fanon's theories of identity and race, and traces his involvement in the independence struggle in Algeria.
Digitally remastered in 2K through the BFI Unlocking Film Heritage programme.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2017 - Experimenta Strand - 2K Restoration World premiere
Memory mixes with desire as a museum attendant is caught up in sado-masochistic fantasies inspired by a 19th Century painting of slaves in chains called 'Scene on the Coast of Africa'. The man remembers his past as a singer and delivers Dido's lament from Purcell's opera.
Official Selection Berlinale 2019 - Panorama 40
Based on the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Derek Jarman's nearly wordless visual narrative intercuts two main stories and a couple of minor ones. A woman, perhaps the Madonna, brings forth her baby to a crowd of intrusive paparazzi; she tries to flee them. Two men who are lovers marry and are arrested by the powers that be. The men are mocked and pilloried, tarred, feathered, and beaten. Loose in this contemporary world of electrical-power transmission lines is also Jesus. The elements, particularly fire and water, content with political power, which is intolerant and murderous. THE GARDEN was originally screened in the Forum programme of the Berlinale in 1991, garnering an OCIC Award - Honourable Mention.
Official Selection Berlinale 2019 - Forum Archival Constellations
Mona Hatoum left Beirut in 1975 for a short visit to London. When war broke out in the Lebanon she found it impossible to return. In this video, letters from her mother in Beirut, written in Arabic, move across the screen. They are read aloud, in English, by the artist. Hatoum's mother is also heard, speaking openly about her feelings and sexuality, accompanied by images of her in the shower.
Hatoum's video suggests exile and displacement. She has said it also challenges 'the stereotype of Arab women as passive, mother as non-sexual being'.
Young men find themselves scattered and defencelessly exposed to a merciless sun. Their gaze moves off searchingly into the distance. Deserted places appear to offer vague promises of refuge. On a prison wall, an explosive image of desire emerges, full of hope for freedom. Constantine Giannaris relishes in mixing light and colour with the textures of Super 8 and video footage to express the thoughts of the poet Jean Genet. Greatly affected by the AIDS epidemic, he addresses the desire for love as well as the threat of isolation and death in a restless cinematographic delirium.
Official Selection Berlinale 2019 - Panorama 40
An epicene angel flutters its wings and smokes a cigarette in this ejaculatory study of frustration, torment, stupidity and insolence. With Cerith Wyn Evans as the angel and music by Michael Nyman. Made at the Royal College of Art in 1985.
An abstract look at daily life in London.
A restoration by Cinémathèque Suisse of an unfinished version of Hans Richter's EVERY DAY (1929), found at the archives of the Cinémathèque in 2012.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Treasures Strand
