Aella

Director: Vasilisa Forbes

Year: 2023

An experimental short about female desire, shame and betrayal. Drawing from a highly personal experience we follow a vulnerable young woman experiencing a breakdown via a collision of conflicting relationships and gender power struggles.<br /> Using physicality, haunting sound design and immersive camera work as vessels for intimate, multi-layered and unerringly contemporary story telling. Our lead finds herself on a repeating loop, the end is the start as she oscillates between what was and what is. Is she unable to escape her trauma and her psychological suffocation or patterning? The movement echoes the work of Pina Bausch, and in doing so draws links to the expression of the feminist landscape of emotion and conflict that we continue to work through.

Director: Vasilisa Forbes

Year: 2021

DELPHYNE (meaning ‘womb’) discusses the stigma around menstruation. Addressing shame and acceptance, taboos around menstrual blood are told through a fabric-themed metaphor, and the conflict between a mother-daughter relationship. The script is stylised in a theatrical form, taking the works of Russian writer Ludmilla Petrushevskaya as a background and filmed in rural Suffolk. The tone draws on Petrushevskaya’s depictions of intense female-driven, claustrophobic family relationships particularly between generations of women who pull at each other in close quarters. Both a folk and fairy-tale element exists to the progress of the film, relating to the directors own heritage. The film is shot in East Anglia, Suffolk.

Director: Victoria Davis

Year: 2025

A tribute to British-French-Polish avant-garde artists Franciszka Themerson and Stefan Themerson.<br /> The director revisits the work of the Themersons, some 15 years after TRACES, her previous film about the couple - collecting new memories and featuring contributions from Michael Horowitz, Barbara Right, Nick Wadley.