Alongside

Director: Dryden Goodwin

Year: 2015

’Unseen: The Lives of Looking’ focuses on four individuals with a distinct relationship to looking - an eye surgeon, a planetary explorer, a human rights lawyer and an artist/filmmaker. Told through Dryden Goodwin’s closely observed drawings, camera work and multilayered soundtrack, it explores different scales, forms and reasons for looking, in a poetic and metaphysically charged journey. Revealing the empathy and dexterity of an eye surgeon, working with the fragile human eye; the quest of a NASA planetary explorer to decode the cosmos and find evidence of life on Mars; and the scrutiny of the British government, by a human rights lawyer, in extraordinary rendition, drone attack and mass surveillance cases. The film’s perspectives range from minute details to panoramic expanses, building an atmospheric and sensual matrix around its subjects. Goodwin includes fleeting vignettes of strangers and a brief focus on his father and son, highlighting the tension in his work between intimacy and anonymity. The film considers both the physical act of looking and how we perceive the world around us: how we contemplate the known and the unknown, the personal and the remote and the imaginative leaps taken to reveal what might be concealed or out of sight.

Director: Rob Curry, Tim Plester

Year: 2026

In a battle against time and technology, can Britain's greatest living folklorist find a home for his vast archive of irreplaceable audiovisual material?

Director: Ben Young

Year: 2026

The alien cosmos of microscopy becomes the setting for a posthumous dialogue: an exploration of the unspoken fallout of the pandemic years.