A VR Journey which tells the story of Victoria Mapplebeck’s breast cancer (as patient and Director) from diagnosis to recovery. THE WAITING ROOM explores illness from a patient’s POV, putting under the microscope what we can and what we can’t control when our bodies fail us.
A box made of whale bone, entangled in a fisherman’s net was washed up on a remote beach in the Outer Hebrides. Once touched the box can change lives.
The box was given to Iain Sinclair almost thirty years ago by Steve Dilworth, a sculptor based on the Island of Harris. It was always intended to be an active thing, kill or cure. An animal battery. And part of the power of the crafted box comes from its lack of signature. At best this object has the anonymity and moral authority of tribal art, of a fetish, a relic or an accidental survivor. It is dangerous. What is inside might produce good magic or it might produce bad magic but like the box that contained Schrödinger’s Cat it must never to be opened.
In 2018 the box was taken on an 800 mile reverse pilgrimage from London back to the Isle of Harris, in the company of the filmmaker Andrew Kötting, the photographer Anonymous Bosch and the writer Iain Sinclair. There was unwellness on the island and they hoped that the box might help, however little did they know the delirium that they would unleash.
And all the while Eden Kötting narrates the story, working as both muse and soothsayer. She tries to make sense of the journey as it unfolds, sometimes awake and sometimes in deep sleep. Ultimately the whalebone box is finally buried in the sand on the very beach from which it came all those ever-so-many years ago BUT something happens at the very end of the film after the credits have finished rolling, something extraordinary and miraculous….
Official Selection FID Marseilles 2019 - World premiere
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
A hand-crafted celluloid film that uses the cycle of life over one year at an English allotment to structure a personal, poetic, hypnotic regression in time of a family's journey through Invitro Fertilisation process (IVF) for their second child, inviting the audience to philosophise and connect with our relationship to the world.
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.
Anthony Godby Johnson was an early 1990s New York City miracle: a boy who escaped years of horrific abuse only to discover that he was dying of AIDS. A boy who authored his own autobiography. A boy who earned friends and fans worldwide—and who did not exist.
DOK Leipzig • International Competition • World Premiere
London Short Film Festival • Official Selection
Flatpack Film Festival • Official Selection
Manchester Film Festival • Official Selection
An interactive VR documentary about the history and legacy of the Aylesbury Estate, the largest housing estate in Europe. Utilising 360 video, photogrammetry, 3D modelling, archive and interactive design, this VR documentary allows the audience to explore the estate and meet residents fighting regeneration.
Official Selection Tribeca Film Festival 2019 - Tribeca Immersive - World premiere
Iceland is a country marked by its frozen nature and extreme temperatures, which give it a certain touristic appeal. The harshness of the climatic conditions and the enthusiasm of tourists regularly cause car accidents to happen. From this phenomenon, verging on absurdity, the artist and filmmaker Ruaidhri Ryan had planned to make a road movie, one that he will never finish. He thus adventures into the different phases of pre-production, production and post-production of what this film could have been.
This film captures the hilarious diary of this failure, in which Ryan calls on a 4x4, a GPS gnawed by the cold, an elf and a Viking guide with whom he maintains a virtual correspondence. Moving between simulated reality, video games and cinema, the film explores the geography of a country marked by the exoticism of its landscapes, often used as backdrops for Hollywood movies. A hilarious look at the way in which new technologies condition our ways of representing territories.
Official Selection Visions du Réel 2019 - International Competition - World premiere
The story of Diva – a fading superstar preparing for a comeback performance at the 2065 'eSports Olympics' – and Geo, an AI with artistic yearnings. Set in a smoke-and-mirrors realm of fantastical architecture, sentient drones and snow-deluged jungles, AIDOL revolves around the long and complex struggle between humanity and Artificial Intelligence.
Fame – in all its allure and emptiness – is set against the bigger contradictions of a post-AI world, a world where originality is sometimes no more than an algorithmic trick and where machines have the capacity for love and suffering. Contemporary anxieties and fixations – the rise of AI, the formulaic dictates of celebrity, the hegemony of technological giants – are refracted through a quixotic prism. AIDOL is accompanied by a score composed and orchestrated by the artist.
![PHX [X is for Xylonite]](/storage/project/images/films/2019/12/PHX_filmstill_11_1564948514609_00ecf85c00_thumb.jpg)
