Originating with research undertaken at the Irish Film Institute Irish Film Archive, artist Duncan Campbell’s piece takes as a starting point a 1960s anthropological film study of rural Kerry to investigate and reframe contemporary Ireland.
In this work Campbell looks at some of the assumptions, ethics and misconceptions that frame the relationship between filmmakers and subjects. The piece is underpinned by extensive research into archival and documentary material, including Paul Hockings and Mark McCarty’s 1968 documentary film, 'The Village', alongside influential anthropological studies. As with much of Campbell’s work, this piece questions the validity of documentary form as historical representation, blurring fact and fiction, recording and interpretation.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2017 - Experimenta Strand
“I was hungry for the coast again and took a bus down along the R675, getting off to walk a while between Annestown and Dungarvan. The cliffs are imperious here and look just like home…” A Cornishman’s travels in Ireland, through Wexford, Waterford and Cork in search of the familiar.
“We are the body. We are under attack." And so the body's immune system is triggered into action. A raging battle has begun between pro and anti-inflammatory forces in the swirling interior of a blister.
'Battle of Blister' was generated by human performers in an interactive film set.
This film seeks to challenge the media construction and distortion of social memory through its representation of the disinvestment and regeneration of the Heygate Estate in London. Heygate became 'sexy' in the symbolic economy as a go-to urban dystopian film and TV location, before its demolition and enclosure as a privatised estate.
Based on the 1940 South African trial of a traditional herbalist accused of 'untraditional behaviour, the film explores the ideological and commercial confrontation between two different yet intertwining medicinal traditions and their uses of plants, with slippages across gender and race.
On the 23rd of June 2016 Britain voted to leave the European Union. This film is a re-working of material from a BBC television debate transmitted a few weeks earlier.
Two evolutionary biologists, Niles Eldredge and Armand Marie Leroi consider the analogies and differences between the cultural and the biological realms, comparing the history of life within the fossil record with the evolution of pop music. Marquiss draws on Eldredge’s pattern of evolution as a cue for image-making processes and editing structures to transpose scientific enquiry into cultural production.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand
A cinematic portrait of New York School composer Christian Wolff. Challenging the limits and conventions of documentary form, this 16mm film continues artist Luke Fowler’s ongoing investigations into vanguard thinkers and cultural producers.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand
Upside down stop-frame images follow a path through Epping Forest on the edge of East London, revealing the beauty of a topsy-turvy forest. The film recalls the attempt by the British government to privatise all the UK forests, but then had to do a U-turn due to large public pressure.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand
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
