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. 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: Pierre-Alain Giraud

Year: 2025

Playing with Fire introduces audiences to an intimate virtual performance by Yuja Wang, inviting guests to witness the physical and mental act of performance through repertoire personally selected by Yuja, ranging from Bach and Chopin to Debussy, Prokofiev and Stravinsky. From this repertoire, writer and director Pierre-Alain Giraud has crafted a narrative and created transformative visual and musical worlds in collaboration with artist Gabríela Friðriksdóttir. At the center of the space, both real and virtual, is a Steinway & Sons Spirio concert grand piano, which acts as the bridge between the concert hall and the artist’s inner visions. The Spirio system—an advanced self-playing technology that can precisely record and reproduce the keystrokes of live performances—recreates Yuja’s virtuosity on the physical instrument in real time, synchronised with the holographic fingers of her virtual self.