In the town of Krabi, a popular tourist destination in southern Thailand, the pre-historic, the recent past and the contemporary capitalist world awkwardly collide. The town’s local folklore and histories are promoted as attractions to foreigners, while the town’s traditional labour force is muted and hidden from the tourists’ eyes. A nameless character, whose identity continually changes, takes us around town to explore various sites that capture Krabi in its current state. These sites uniquely illustrate how Krabi’s folklore is propagated and commodified to fill the need of tourism industry.
A docu-fiction work from Ben Rivers and Anocha Suwichakornpong developed from ideas explored in their 2018 Thailand Biennale installation piece 'The Ambassadors'.
Official Selection Locarno Film Festival 2019 - Moving Ahead - World premiere
Official Selection Toronto International Film Festival 2019 - Wavelengths
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Special Presentation
A unique three-episode hybrid of real-time VR experience, live performance, and video essay in which three moving image makers explore how we now watch films by putting various ‘machines for viewing’ including cinema and virtual reality face to face.
Official Selection Sundance Film Festival 2020 - New Frontier
'Part One: Where There Is a Joyous Mood, There a Comrade Will Appear to Share a Glass of Wine' concerns affective relations and community building. The film is like a spell or a promise for a new and more liberating type of family structure. The film has a non-linear narrative that weaves various intimate settings, some within shared domestic spaces, others in outdoor environments. Shot in Lithuania, London, and Edinburgh, the film features the artist and her children, as well as close friends, which she considers extended family.
In the process of creating this new work, Rosalind Nashashibi questions how a group’s sense of commonality is dissolved when there is an absence of communal experience and adherence to linear time. Through an open-ended discussion of space and time travel in the film, which is in part inspired by the creation and dissolution of group relationships in Ursula Le Guin’s “The Shobies’ Story” (1990), Nashashibi explores new modes of conviviality, considering the absence of the nuclear family structure without an imperative model in sight.
Official Selection Berlinale 2019 - Forum Expanded - International premiere
On a grey day, a woman sits alone on a beach and calmly watches the birds. As she sits, she is joined by various people who make up the tapestry of her life, in a film about the fragile, fallible and human stories that compose our memories.
Barry wants to have vicarious immortality through his children but finds he can’t have kids. His friend invites him to a private club of which he is second in line, The Ancient Order Of Nocturnal Immortal Phlebotomists Of Albion, whose members live forever by sucking the blood of others. However, their membership is literally dying out because of their rare blood group – B Negative. Barry tries to help with their marketing, something he has never done before, and carries out various unpalatable tasks in return for gaining true immortality.
Following a 21-year-old artist suffering from a various mental disorders, including severe perfectionism, she will do up to 10 copies of her work, often throwing it away. After a week of practice with a tattoo gun, will she be able to tattoo someone for the first time?
Three films made from found footage, video diaries, performance and to-camera discourse. Music and narrative voiceover connect the chapters searching for subjectivity through various existential backdrops; from responses to love with addiction, pain and release, to a detective story set in Jaffa and Tel Aviv, and finally a dance across Europe in search of a happy ending.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2018 - Experimenta Strand -World premiere
Following artist Bill Drummond over two years of his 12-year World Tour: At work in Kolkata, India, and in Lexington, North Carolina, doing his self-imposed 'work' – building beds, baking cakes, making soup, shining shoes – to the variously amused, perplexed or annoyed reactions of those around him.
With shots of water supplied by volunteers around the world, International Waters is a poetry film about how we are all connected by water and it it to be valued because it will still be here after we have gone.
In the small town of Quaint, Bruce Levin owns a respectable B&B establishment. Sleeping around with various women behind his wife's back, he does not realise that his actions are soon to catch up with him in the form of a mysterious traveller, Sya.
This Science Fiction docudrama/mockumentary revolves around a dystopian future world and the possible consequences of today's actions. A young reporter highlights the issues a mind controlling drug has on the population and the moral aspects of a higher powers influence.
As this reporter begins to visit various individuals, the homeless and those about to loose everything trying to survive or thrive in this new world of "Recycling", he thinks on the right and wrong of what he records. But as he comes to the end of his investigations, visiting the person in charge of this new world he realises that things are much worse that what he ever imagined..
A personal portrait of British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran documented by Sheeran's cousin Murray Cummings. Following this modest performer’s creative processes, from an early-morning jam in the garden to a finished song, from the first chord to the honed lyrics. Whether observing Sheeran’s collaboration with producer Benny Blanco, the tension during a recording session at the legendary Abbey Road Studios, or paying a visit to Sheeran's first musical mentor at his old high school, Cummings gives voice to the people who know Sheeran the best. Drawing on photos and family, Cummings makes use of his own memories and the various stages of Sheeran’s development to create a portrait of a man obsessed by music. The film eschews the celebrity hype to concentrate on the intensive work on the current album in California’s creative quarter, providing us with intimate insights into the workings of this musician as he navigates between his own artistic aspirations and the demands of the music industry.
Official Selection Berlinale 2018 - Berlinale Special Gala - World premiere