In a hair-salon in Haifa, the director installs a mini film-set over the washing-basin. As she washes their hair, she converses with the salon’s clients - Arabs and Jews, on topics ranging from politics to love. What emerges from these conversations is an honest and nuanced portrayal of contemporary Israel.
In the summer of 1990, a teenage filmmaker successfully raises $100,000 to shoot a pioneering horror film. 25 years later, he tells the story of a cult classic that never was.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Cult Strand
Better known by his pseudonym Araucaria, John Graham set The Guardian crossword for 55 years. In December 2012, crossword number 25,842 appeared in the paper with a series of clues revealing a personal message to his followers.
'Dear Araucaria' unpicks the crossword to journey into John’s world of clue-making.
Twenty-eight short experimental videos made by me over the last 10 years are being shown simultaneously on 8 projectors at Espace Croisé, Centre d'Art Contemporain, La Condition Publique in Roubaix, a short metro journey from Lille. This video gives some idea of what the show looks like.
Out of the darkness a sound emerges. Terrified people take to the streets in search of its source. They get their cameras out, documenting the sky. We watch on, our muscles contract and our pupils dilate.
This film piece explores the circulation, spectatorship and undeclared politics of contemporary networked images.
A film centred upon the dramatic and volatile landscape of Iceland; interfusing the cultural, political and ecological forces that shape the island. The film combines Iceland's remarkable terrain with two corresponding voice-overs from the past and present: poet W.H. Auden, reading ‘Journey to Iceland’ (1937), and environmental activist Ómar Ragnarsson.
A traumatised patient, trapped in a destructive relationship with her megalomaniac doctor, resorts to desperate measures to escape. Legal text and medical records interwoven with pulsing pills tell a story of addictive, emotional enmeshment.
Taking inspiration from Felice Casorati's painting 'Eggs on a Book', photographers Metz+Racine and film director Mototake Makishima collaborated to create a 'still-life' short film. Set in Italy of the 1940's against a backdrop of political unrest, the film explores the mysterious world of objects and the enigmatic symbolism of eggs.
’Unseen: The Lives of Looking’ focuses on four individuals with a distinct relationship to looking - an eye surgeon, a planetary explorer, a human rights lawyer and an artist/filmmaker. Told through Dryden Goodwin’s closely observed drawings, camera work and multilayered soundtrack, it explores different scales, forms and reasons for looking, in a poetic and metaphysically charged journey. Revealing the empathy and dexterity of an eye surgeon, working with the fragile human eye; the quest of a NASA planetary explorer to decode the cosmos and find evidence of life on Mars; and the scrutiny of the British government, by a human rights lawyer, in extraordinary rendition, drone attack and mass surveillance cases. The film’s perspectives range from minute details to panoramic expanses, building an atmospheric and sensual matrix around its subjects. Goodwin includes fleeting vignettes of strangers and a brief focus on his father and son, highlighting the tension in his work between intimacy and anonymity. The film considers both the physical act of looking and how we perceive the world around us: how we contemplate the known and the unknown, the personal and the remote and the imaginative leaps taken to reveal what might be concealed or out of sight.
An impressionist journey through the archive of the Leeds Pavilion, which in the 1980s started out as a feminist photo studio. Former members, male and female, give their vision of the studio’s artistic and activist past, the reasons for which are as current as ever.
International Film Festival Rotterdam 2015 - World premiere
Dreams Rewired traces the desires and anxieties of today’s hyper-connected world back more than a hundred years, when telephone, film and television were new. As revolutionary then as contemporary social media is today, early electric media sparked a fervent utopianism in the public imagination – promising total communication, the annihilation of distance, an end to war. But then, too, there were fears over the erosion of privacy, security, morality.
Using rare (and often unseen) archival material from nearly 200 films to articulate the present, Dreams Rewired reveals a history of hopes to share, and betrayals to avoid.
