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: Anna Maguire, Kyle Greenberg

Year: 2026

What if you went on a holiday and the apocalypse happened? GALICIA! is a found-footage, hybrid-documentary following a couple through home video footage as they visit their friends at a winery in rural Spain and inadvertently capture the end of days. We live in a time where the sense of our impending mutually assured destruction is more real than it’s ever been. GALICIA! Takes the form of a holiday video - a document of a couple before - and after the great cataclysm. The film starts as something that feels unedited - an accidental video diary of an ordinary couple that feels somewhat ghostly as much as it is also pedestrian. As the film evolves and degrades, we are led to question the fragility of humanity, as well as its power to endure.