A young boy releases a cloud into a church and it builds to a storm. Elwood’s Ark is a poem that challenges notions of religion and redemption. It traces the journey of the water we drink, back 13.8 billion years through time and space to the beginning of the Universe.
Spoken in the words of a child, the film warns of a coming apocalypse. It is an apocalypse of our own making - an apocalypse in which divine intervention will not play a part, and only we ourselves may prevent.
Exploring the intangibility of how one experiences and records the present through bodily sensations, referencing Marcel Proust’s notion of ‘Involuntary Memory’.
The residual, the soil and stains aren’t mere reconstruction of the past but an attempt to return to ritualise fragments of the absent. The desire to remember, embeds the past involuntarily within the present.
Using the metaphor of the Stoneymollan Trail, a hiking trail out of Glasgow, the film explores Charlotte Prodger’s personal archive, with material from multiple formats that includes an archive of miniDV tapes that Prodger shot between 1999 and 2004, recent footage shot on her iPhone and HD camera, and screenprinted graphic forms. The resulting single-screen video piece is a meditation on memory, subjectivity and desire.
BFI London Film Festival 2015 - World premiere
Shot on the otherworldly beaches of Morocco in silvery black-and-white 16mm Scope 'A Distant Episode' transforms behind-the-scenes footage into a dreamy film fragments depicting sci-fi incursions into a mythic landscape.
Official Selection Toronto 2015 - Wavelengths
Shot in Paris, São Paulo and Toronto, acclaimed Canadian contemporary artist Mark Lewis’ essay film captures the ever-changing textures of these cities through moving images of glass, light, shadows and reflections. Offering an homage to the city symphony films of the 1920s, whilst juxtaposing modernist architecture with the compositional structures of old master paintings.
Toronto International Film Festival 2015 - World premiere
This installation piece is the first major collaboration between British artist Corin Sworn and Canadian artist Tony Romano.
'La Giubba' follows the intersections of five drifters over the course of two summer days in southern Italy. A young Albanian man and his daughter search for a swimming coach who fled their homeland in the 1990s, but instead find an Arbëresh community settled by their countrymen 600 years earlier. Two theatre actors take on a dubious commission to increase audiences in the rural south and traverse the landscape fashioning little theatres of belief, until a Canadian interloper turns up. Employing professional and amateur actors, 'La Giubba' situates its nomadic characters within both the stunning Italian landscape and the history inscribed upon it, visible and unseen.
Official Selection Toronto 2015 - Wavelengths
Inspired by William Gaddis’s novel "JR", 'Solo for Rich Man' restages a quintet of performance pieces (including one by Fluxus artist George Maciunas) from a four-day experimental music workshop for children conceived by artist and filmmaker Beatrice Gibson and renowned cellist Anton Likoszevieze.
Official Selection Toronto 2015 - Wavelengths
From the far west of Cornwall comes a contemporary moral tale of love, lust, birth, death, infidelity, murder, revenge, redemption...and the housing crisis.
Shot on a clockwork camera, on 16mm black & white negative stock, and processed by hand using an instant coffee based developer.
A film which aims to opens up a discourse on the Black British experience; interrupting the emotional transition between generations and questioning what it means to be British
A well known 35mm blockbuster trailer is cut up, dismantled,
reassembled and re-edited with tape and scissors. Printed by
torchlight and developed in a bucket… an impossible film.
Set in Egypt, Greece, Italy and the US, Anja Kirschner's piece reflects on the way psychological, historical and material realities are connected through the prism of the filmmaking progress itself.
Its main protagonists - a director and a screenwriter are in the early stages of developing a commercial feature film, but soon their own conflicting desires and the events simultaneously occurring around them, take them far beyond their initial intentions. Forced to radically reconfigure her project, the director becomes more and more drawn into conversations with the actors she has cast, which centre on the way cinema intersects with their own lives and gives expression to the realities they are confronted with.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand
