Archive footage, music and voice combine to explore the choreography of childhood and the possibility of childish autonomy.
In a world ruled by adults, how does the child in film resist oppression and control? The childish imagination escapes in flights of fantasy, both brief and absorbing. Energy is directed and contained. "I'm live as a battery. Who am I to you?"
A Magic Realist Documentary.
The film weaves together real and mythical events to create connections between the history of the Crystal Palace in London and the sculpture called Psyche Abandoned. The story reveals how a moment in the life of a young woman called Psyche was captured in marble and travelled through time and space to sit in the same park overlooking South London for the last 170 years, while world wars, fires, explosions, royalty, music events, funfairs and circuses have rushed past her in endless succession.
This ‘moment’ is the only constant in a story of splendour and spectacle, and like all the best stories, if only half of it is true it is still an incredible tale.
A woman in her 30s living in London struggles with the feelings of isolation, decides to call up various customer care lines in search of connection. She seeks dating advice from her bank, talks about films with her doctor and bonds with her Internet provider over the topic of reincarnation.
Official Selection Molodist Kyiv International Film Festival 2023
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
Lucy, a failed actor who lives in a dysfunctional relationship with agoraphobic screenwriter Paul, is surprised to find herself on the cusp of a none-too-secret affair with her new work colleague, Daniel. The thrill of the chase for a shred of affection takes her mind off her problematic life but she's not sure that she'll ever leave Paul, or that sex with someone else is the true answer to her problems.
A first date becomes a torment of past and present relationships. Set in a quirky west London restaurant, millennials Adira and Dan sit down to their first date together.
Despite matching on a dating app, on the first impression, photographer Dan does not fit Adira’s archetype. After an awkward first course, screenwriter Adira explains her struggles with writer's block, Dan suggests she write a screenplay of her own life.
Awkward silences at the dining table transport us to intimate moments with Adira in her flat. We see her struggles with depression and loneliness. A dark figure follows Adira like a shadow through London streets. Gushing streams moving upward through a Nordic valley take us deep into Adira’s sub-consciousness.
Moving through various dream-like states reality becomes uncertain. Adira is writing, we hear the typewriter violently tapping, is she changing the course of events? Back at the restaurant, Dan has become visibly distressed. His character viscous.
This is life through a social media lens, a fifty-word limit, and endless filters - until a violent encounter brings reality crashing down.
An immersive installation and Virtual Reality animated and interactive artwork focussed on reproductive diseases and pain that women experience: endometriosis, fibroids, polyps, Ovarian and other cysts, cervical, ovarian, uterine and endometrial cancers.
The sensory and emotional experience moving from the outside in within a real dome space into VR space, with a 3D audio soundscape of the voices and stories of real women recounting their experiences, making it an intimate, emotional and possibly haunting experience, with accompanying wearable haptic garment providing a visceral vibration responsive on the lower abdomen, where the various diseases occur.
Some time after the death of their mother, two sisters Phoebe and Dot, both performance artists, have returned to their family home on the Isle of Wight, a large house crammed full of Edwardian bohemian memorabilia and accumulated family clutter. Before selling the house, they are working on a site specific piece which will reflect their troubled childhood memories and their mother’s work as a composer; she wrote music for both pianola and music box which included songs using the words of the Victorian poet, Mary Coleridge whose poem 'A Clever Woman' becomes the title of the film.
The action takes place over one day when the sisters’ producer/curator , Monica comes to visit. With them all is Tom, a young man who has been house-sitting; he is also an accomplished musician and the sisters have started to get him involved in their project. As the day progresses the sisters rehearse some of their mother songs and work on dramatising various aspects of her life including her complicated marriage and serial infidelity; this produces a heightened and haunting atmosphere which, coupled with an unexpected connection between Tom and Monica, leads to dramatic revelations and an explosive and poignant conclusion.
Part erotic lyric video, part theme park from hell.
The film is essentially a lyric video that tells the tale of a traumatic event through the use of text, animation and sound. The film includes various overwhelming surreal, hyper-saturated environments, beginning with a cliched CGI animation of a flower opening against a perfectly kitsch blue sky. The world then morphs into a hand-shaped planet that in some way resembles a Theme Park. Debunking the white middle-class American family, the amusement park becomes a place of hell. Sounds are amplified and screams of excitements are modified to become screams of pain. With a nod to the excess of meme culture, additional muffled, tinny sounds of Instagram clips play throughout the background on a continual loop, beginning and ending abruptly, resembling the longevity of a ten-second Instagram story. Within the film there is a prevalent sense of slippage, the text begins to get lost as you get distracted by the alluring campiness of the background visuals. Due to this fleeting time with the text, the reader ends up constructing the already written tale themselves, creating their own constructed translation of an already fractured story. The text itself is a mix of erotic and confessional writing, discussing the complexity that is inherent in a gay man's lust. Conjoining sexual fantasy with the prospect of failure, the text flips between the distinctions of reality and the delusion of erotic imagination. Containing themes of anger, desire and trauma, the text is both fictional and autobiographical.
Raymond and Keith are both homeless, variously living on the streets or bunking in Keith’s occasional temporary accommodation. Raymond is determined to climb out of the hole they are in and obtain some permanent accommodation, but will the system allow it?
Beginning in Vienna where the filmmaker meets her father, David, whom she hasn’t seen since she was two. Through a mixture of onscreen text, sit down interviews and archival footage, David’s early life as a teenage activist in Northern Ireland is revealed. The film then travels to Belfast and segues into an impossible reconstruction of David’s early years. In and attempt to better know him, Garnett uses previously recorded audio interviews to skillfully craft a lip-synced, cross-gender performance where she impersonates the his youthful presence and casts a transgender actress in the role of his girlfriend. The film cycles through various camera modes – narrative vignettes on RED alongside handheld camcorder footage of contemporary Belfast street life mixed with these verbatim re-enactments – to create a fragmented account of a teenager struggling to find an identity in a rapidly deteriorating society, and the parallel struggle of a filmmaker to connect with her estranged father. The layers of texture in this film mirror the fractured lens of history, and point to the impossibility of filmmaking as a container for 'Truth'. In TROUBLE, cinema is a means of rebuilding family ties of highlighting the complexities of representation and the construction of identity.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Experimenta Strand - World premiere
With an elephant's ivory tusk as the protagonist, artist-filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland's film meditates upon the endless tactility of museological and ecological conservation, inviting reflection upon forms of representation, replicas, and embodiments of various materials, disciplines, and institutions.
Official Selection Locarno Film Festival 2019 - Moving Ahead - World premiere
Official Selection Toronto International Film Festival 2019 - Wavelengths
