Taking as its starting point the photographic archives of the Thistle Foundation and Craigmillar Festival Society, rather than examining the known facts and details of the photographs held in the archives, the narrator uses them to recall her own memories of making photographs as a teenager.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand
Filmed in and around the island of Taiwan, the film is structured around an interview with contemporary artist Chen Chieh-Jen. The film explores the relationship between film, landscape and rural life and the layered histories of these sites as potential places of self-organisation and resistance. Built around the question of translation and the relationship of what we hear to what we see, the film follows Chen's retelling of the farmer's tradition of using film screenings as means of covert political assembly during the Japanese colonial rule of Taiwan.
The title is an English translation of the Chinese term / yúnhai, used to describe the view from Taiwan's highest mountains when everything below is hidden from view by a sea of clouds.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand - World premiere
Made in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, a free adaptation of the poem 'The Sea is History' by Derek Walcott as a materialist and animist critique of the monumentalisation of European colonial history and its ripples into the present.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand
An enthralling montage of magical moments of cinema-going extracted from movie history exploring the entire film-going experience: underage boys attempting to get into a cinema to see some bare flesh; pretentious debates in the queues; loading choc ices into trays, and of course the trailers and the main feature. Films from every genre play as lovers meet, criminals hide in the dark and rapt audiences watch on.
Witness how the industry works, with red carpet premieres and stars appearing in iconic scenes. Selected from titles too numerous to mention, there are favourites from the Golden Age of Hollywood, Italian Neorealism, British cinema classics and much more, all seamlessly brought together to resonate with our own emotional memories of the cinema. (LFF brochure)
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand - World premiere
Transcending the sound and visual of the drum, using nature’s most destructive forces fire and water as catalysts for destruction and creating a mood piece of raw, ritualistic, drumming phenomena.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Cult Strand
An essay film analysing the space of the city as a product, its inhabitation – its spatial negotiation, its encoding by racial privilege, and who controls it. The city is Detroit and the economy of the car has been replaced by a spatial economy.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand - World premiere
Taking its title from the French Surrealist artist, Claude Cahun’s (1894-1954) incomplete memoir 'Confidences au miroir', Sarah Pucill's film brings life to the photographic and written archive of Claude Cahun amidst a visual extravaganza of costumes and hand-made sets.
Following Cahun’s text, the film includes Cahun’s early and later life and work, including her political propaganda activity and imprisonment in Jersey with her partner Suzanne Malherbe during the Nazi occupation of the island. The tracing of a life is made conscious through the projection of images of the couples' home in Jersey into a domestic London setting.
As a sequel to director Sarah Pucill's previous film 'Magic Mirror' (2013), this film continues her experiment to bring cinematic life to the photographic and written archive of Claude Cahun. In this film Pucill animates re-stagings of Cahun’s black and white self-portrait and still–life photographs with voices from Cahun's text 'Confidences au miroir', collaging and transposing black and white stills and words, into colour and soundscape.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand - World premiere
An intimate and vivid account of a young girl’s real and fantastical adventure in a remote forest one evening.
Glasgow-based artist-filmmaker Margaret Salmon's debut feature is not only a loving homage to classic children’s films such as Ray Ashley’s 'Little Fugitive', Jean Renoir’s 'The River' and Albert Lamorisse’s 'The Red Balloon', but draws from nature studies of the past, such as Mary Field’s 'Secrets of Nature' series.
Shot on 35mm in various locations around Scotland, Salmon draws inspiration from a range of cinematic movements as well as wildlife documentaries to produce a lyrical and sensual portrait of a child’s eye perspective on the natural world. (LFF brochure)
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand - World premiere
Using double screen, the filmmaker juxtaposes her domestic family history with that of Nelson Mandela prior to his arrest. The artist considers the roles that personal and political histories play in opening up the narratives of a place.
Liliesleaf Farm, located in Rivonia South Africa, was the headquarters of the military wing of the African National Congress, (‘Umkhonto we Sizwe') in the early 1960s. Nelson Mandela lived at Liliesleaf under an alias. ‘Operation Mayibuye’ was an ANC undercover campaign of sabotage intended to bring down the apartheid government.
Ideas for the film originated with 8mm film footage and photographs of
Gaal-Holmes’ immigrant family at Liliesleaf. Her German and Hungarian parents had recently moved to settle in South Africa, and Liliesleaf became their family home for a short time in the late 1960s.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand - World premiere
A recreation and contemplation inspired by the 31-mile walk of refugee Abdul Rahman Haroun through the Channel Tunnel. On arrival to the UK Haroun was arrested under an arcane Victorian railway law.
The language in this bylaw, when juxtaposed against the physical and emotional feat of traversing 30 miles of the Channel Tunnel supplies the terrain for this film.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand
By shooting through the take-up reel of a 16mm film projector, this experimental nature documentary remediates the iconic landscape of the American south-west to unnerving effect.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Short Film Competition - Experimenta Strand
