Artist Jumana Manna sets out in search of the musical diversity of historical Palestine. Drawing on her research into the German-Jewish ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann (1892-1939) and his work in Palestine, the film follows Manna’s exchanges with musicians as she encounters them in their homes and places of work and worship.
Berlinale 2016 - World premiere
A look into the anxiety of vertigo and a discordance between technology, self and the natural world. Re- appropriated footage is taken from 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory', accommodating the tone of the volatile character Willy Wonka. As our sensory bodies are plummeted through fictional landscapes with sinister undertones, inducing fear into our fantasy.
In 1983, writer and theologian John Hull went blind. To help make sense of his loss, he began keeping an audio diary. Encompassing dreams, memory and imaginative life 'Notes on Blindness' creates an impression of his new world, immersing the audience in John’s experience of blindness.
A feature-length version of Middleton and Spinney's 2014 Sundance-selected short 'Notes on Blindness'.
Official Selection Sundance Film Festival 2016 - New Frontier - World premiere
This film presents one art form through another; architecture through film. If architecture is the interplay of built form in light and film is the viewing of images through light, can an architectural film present images of wood, light and stone that might shape our religious and spiritual life?
“for the time being” is a collage of moving images made thirty years apart and re-worked into seventeen sections of tentative autobiography. The soundtrack mixes music and environmental sound with conversation, not all of it intelligible. In the scraps that are, the film-maker and his partner talk together about how we document and re-interpret our lives.
In their debut documentary Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor take as their point of departure the compelling 18th Century figure, Ambrose O’Higgins - father of Bernardo O’Higgins, the first leader of Independent Chile - and attempt to retrace his remarkable journey from Ireland to Chile. Having long dreamt of making a biopic of O’Higgins, this wayward and wry documentary is the filmmakers’ attempt to realise this dream through a personal voyage into the idea of the cinematic location. However, as they speculate on the idea of place and what O’Higgins embodies, the filmmakers continually get sidetracked by a competing story of immigration and displacement. A story that began with a newspaper cutting from 1937, concerning an 11 month old baby who travelled unaccompanied, by ship, across the Atlantic from New York to Cobh. Gradually, and not without humour, these intertwining narratives uncover ideas about the transformative powers of travelling, as looked at through the peculiar prism of the Irish experience.
A film exploring what can be seen and what can not, how scientists imagine their work and how they describe it.
The film is based on the work undertaken in Dr Serge Mostowy’s laboratory on septin assembly in cells, using a zebrafish model. Lab members describe the intricate sub-cellular septin dynamics and structure. Their explanatory drawings, and discussion between scientists and filmmaker about how they see the research, are incorporated into the animation.
This video by MATLAKAS is a journey through the cycle of life and death in relation to objects and daily routine. The second life of objects, and the memory they witness and carry with them. Highlighting our transient existence. An inner monologue leads us through a journey of life, death, and resurrection, in a day in the second-hand market...
Exploring the elusive and complex effects of war on women’s role in ballistic research and early computing, the film features new and archival high speed bullet photography, schlieren and electric spark imagery, bullet sound wave imagery, forensic ballistic photography, slide rulers, punch cards, computer diagrams, and a soundtrack by Scanner.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand
Jennifer left Gibraltar and entered an enclosed community of Discalced Carmelites nearly 30 years ago. The cloistered community live out an ideal of work and prayer as a creative life. The quotes are from Teresa of Avila’s “Way of Perfection” the spiritual guide she wrote for her Carmelite nuns.
Seven years in the making, the project was realised through the collaboration between inside and outside the convent walls. Filmed inside the convent by Jennifer and Alejandro Roman a volunteer who for some years helps out the community and is the only person allowed inside.
The film gives us rare access to the monastery and her enclosed life within it.
An installation piece which is a return to, and a modern elaboration upon, Vincent Van Gogh’s Provence landscapes.
A series of digital paintings interrogate and reframe concepts of representation and perception through image manipulation and augmented reality. Using bucolic and contemplative images, juxtaposed with raw data visualization, the project suggests alternate modes of visual synthesis.
Official Selection Sundance Film Festival 2017 - New Frontier
