The story of the footsoldiers of the early feminist movement as they fought for the right to vote, women who were forced underground to pursue a dangerous game of cat and mouse with an increasingly brutal state.
Telluride Film Festival 2015 - World premiere
Through a series of oral testimonies and carefully composed portraits, Alone Together, the Social Life of Benches explores how individuals and groups spend time in two distinctive public London locations.
Made by Esther Johnson as part of an Arts & Humanities Research Council project, this poetic documentary illuminates the thoughts and memories of frequent users of General Gordon Square, Woolwich, and St Helier Open Space, Sutton.
Revolving around the micro-space of the humble bench, the film incorporates contributions from a diverse range of visitors. These testimonies highlight themes such as the psychological feeling of being in a space, the rhythm and flow of visitors to a place, the importance of design for everyday street furniture and access to communal outdoor space.
The film acts like a stranger who joins you to ‘watch the world go by’, and to break the ice by starting a conversation with their fellow bench user.
Keeping Up With the Kashubians is an observational film taking place in Kashubia, a rural region of northern Poland. Through capturing the daily life – people at work, at home and on the streets – we see how, if at all, the local identity and language exist within modern-day Europe.
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.
A lonely little girl tries to create a new world for herself and an equally lonely man. In a visually stunning dreamscape, she finds that freedom and home are synonymous — and that they come at a steep cost.
Official Selection Toronto 2015 - Short Cuts
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
In a bustling village near Addis Ababa, an Ethiopian girl becomes aware of strange new feelings that are both discomfiting and exciting. As her burgeoning sexuality begins to colour her experience of the world, it threatens to bring her into conflict with societal expectations.
Official Selection Toronto 2015 - Short Cuts
In a rural Indian village called Ujhaas, four ordinary women begin to throw off the traditions that hold them in servitude, and question the status quo that favours men and ostracizes women for being educated and opinionated.
Toronto International Film Festival 2015 - World premiere
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
Love, Revenge… and Haute Couture.
A glamorous woman returns to her small home town in rural Australia. With her sewing machine and haute couture style, she transforms the women and exacts sweet revenge on those who did her wrong.
