SaF05 is named after a maned lioness that figures in the work as a cipher for queer attachment and desire. This animal is the last of several maned lionesses documented in the Okavango Delta and is only known to artist and filmmaker Charlotte Prodger through a database of behaviours and camera-trap footage logged across several years. These indexes of SaF05’s existence are intersected with autobiographical fragments from Prodger’s own life that fluctuate between proximity and distance. Her voiceover traces a chronology of intimate gestures and interpersonal connections from prepubescence to the present, inscribed with the incidental details of territorial delineation, sovereignty and land use. Central to these fluctuations is a tension between macro and micro, the experienced and the described.
SaF05 is the last in a trilogy of videos that began with Stoneymollan Trail (2015) and was followed by BRIDGIT (2016). This autobiographical cycle traces the accumulation of affinities, desires and losses that form a self as it moves forward in time.
Official Selection Toronto International Film Festival - Wavelengths
Exploring Oscar and BAFTA-nominated cinematographer Bradford Young's early works - Outlining Young’s location within a lineage of visual artists who he always claims as inspirations as well as echo chambers, and who are actively formulating a new black aesthetics. (liquid blackness)
A sci-fi short set in the aftermath of an eco-disaster. An abandoned nuclear reactor under the biblical town of Bethlehem has been converted into an enormous orchard. Using heirloom seeds collected in the final days before the apocalypse, a group of scientists are preparing to replant the soil above.
In the hospital wing of the underground compound, the orchard’s ailing founder is on her deathbed, as her young successor, who is born underground, comes to visit her. The talk between the two scientists soon evolves into an intimate dialogue about memory, exile and inherited trauma.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Official Short Film Competition - Experimenta Strand
Three characters search for meaning in an urban weed. The Narrator pursues perdikaki to find the woman first seen picking it, yet as observations accumulate a shadow researcher emerges. Is Kyria’s knowledge being sought, or the Collector’s? And, other than the symbolic plant, do the other figures exist at all?
Orbiting 3D images of plastics are collaged with hand-processed 16mm film, including scenes from the demolition of the Parkesine factory in Hackney Wick, London, where the first semi-synthetic plastic was invented. Both flickering, contingent materials allude to the history of cellulose nitrate in the development of photography and film.
A woman, tormented to the point of madness by her lust for a man she works with, visits a Shawafa, a Moroccan witch, to find a cure. Has this man cast a spell on her, is she possessed by a bad jinn? Whatever it is, the woman, the Shawafa and her maid find their lives totally transformed by its presence.
The tragic story of an American music virtuoso who found in 1970s Iran the love and acceptance he never received back home, and who was punished by his country upon his return after the Iranian revolution.
Over images of a young boy playing the accordion in a home movie from 1940’s America, a radio host comments on the trial that was to ruin Lloyd Miller´s life decades later in the Eighties – for charges he was innocent of.
The images of the young boy are quickly replaced with images of an Iranian TV show from the 1970’s, where a sharply dressed man named Kurosh Ali Khan is being interviewed in Farsi about his musical creation, Oriental Jazz. Music kicks in, and now we see the man presented in a video, much younger, playing the santur, a Persian instrument, accompanied by jazz. A voice begins to narrate, in the third person, the story of Kurosh, an American man who is forced by political circumstances to leave the country he’s considered his only real home for seven years. He is on his way back to America, leaving his life as a famous TV host behind him.
An intimate portrait of Hobbit and Jake, who have decided to raise their one-year-old child Anoush gender open. The family lives on a houseboat in the UK and in order to prevent people from making gender-related assumptions, they are keeping the biological sex of their baby a secret.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Debate Strand