Projects in genres: Experimental

Synopsis

Ste Giddings grew up with addictions in himself and those around him. At 26 he was giving up on life. STEPHEN is a film-within-a-film that combines narrative fiction with real-life observation and archive material. It takes us on intimate journeys into two characters as Ste auditions for and takes on a role in a fiction film. Produced with a mixed cast of people in addiction/recovery alongside four professional actors, the film presents alternative perspectives on urgent social questions including alcohol/drug misuse, gambling and mental health. As fiction merges with reality the separation between person, actor and character at times dissolves.
Official Selection Sheffield DocFest 2023 - World premiere

Synopsis

Many queer people are alienated from the idea of undressing for a massage, entering a typical barbershop for a 'men's haircut' while being perceived as something else, or facing the repercussions of a 'controversial' tattoo. BEING SEEN follows three individuals as they each attend an appointment with queer practitioners.
Official Selection Encounters International Film Festival 2023

Synopsis

A meditation on growth and symbiosis, inspired by the entangled lives of fungi. Journey into a hidden world where edges blur, connection is vital and life thrives through togetherness.
Official Selection Annecy International Animated Film Festival 2023

Synopsis

An autobiographical short film that tells the story of Neapolitan teenager Dino Desica, who joins a neo-fascist group to escape discrimination for being non-Roman and queer. The film's title references a controversial 2006 political debate statement, adding layers of historical context.

Synopsis

The film features a group of women who reside in a care home in a small market town of Sefrou, Morocco. HER PLOT OF BLUE SKY is a record of one of the days in which the Amazigh women inhabitants of the care home were seen using the cameras. The images they create - of themselves and others - are playful yet harrowing, they point to the invisibility of women, non-hetero normative, neurodiverse, functionally diverse and elderly people in media more general. Woven into the women's narratives is Rachida Madani’s poem, Tales of a Severed Head.

Synopsis

The installation triptych employs AI-imagery to explore themes of desire and the expanding gap between real experience and artificial representations in the digital age. The interactive experience consists of three related works that use AI to augment, subvert, and negate the iconic image of the Hollywood kiss. Using a queer lens to appropriate a classic Hollywood aesthetic, the work places AI within the history of image-production technologies meant to incite and homogenize our desires. In the process, it reveals the nature of AI imagery and hints at how our most intimate desires will continue to be stretched and shaped by artificial representations at an accelerating pace.
Official Selection SXSW Film Festival 2020 - XR Experience Special Event- International premiere

Synopsis

When a Filipino victim of modern slavery in the UK stops responding, her rescuers fear the worst. By exploring their own memories and experiences of slavery, her would-be rescuers find strength in their community and resolve to save her.
Official Selection SXSW Film Festival 2024 - International premiere

Synopsis

A meditation on the continuing history and emancipatory potential of the Black church as a space of diasporic belonging, affirmation and community organising. The film examines churches as spaces of 'infrapolitics' by exploring the sonic, political, spiritual and existential connections between specific communities.
Official Selection Black Star Film Festival 2023
Official Selection Hot Docs Festival 2023
Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 2024

Synopsis

Minevissam maps the journeys of various characters, whose pasts continue to echo through other times and places. As they search for better words and worlds, a poet, a painter and an owl attempt to translate their tales for and with each other.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2023

Synopsis

This project focused on the physicality of screens, interrogating how we experience and engage with the immaterial. The feeling of overstimulation, prompted by the flashing of lights and blaring of speakers is what I aimed to capture in my film, envisioning how this overload of stimuli travels to the brain.

Synopsis

A mythical short film that charts the journey of a priestess attempting to cross the threshold between mortal and immortal worlds in search of resources for her ailing world. In this liminal space, she meets a group of deities called Smoke Jumpers, who are custodians of ancestral knowledge who trade the secrets of the fire rituals but warn her about their practical use.

Synopsis

THE FLESH OF LANGUAGE draws connections between zoological research related to the extinct ‘Irish Elk’, parapsychologist Konstantin Raudive’s EVP tape recordings and tactics of media preservation as explained by an archivist. Analogies are drawn between extinct deer and dying media formats which come head to head in a choreographed, exuberant species-resurrection scene.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2024