Ex Memoria

Director: Josh Appignanesi

Year: 2025

A hybrid documentary that takes us on a poetic, essayistic journey into the heart of darkness that was COP28 in Dubai. What’s it like to show up at COP, full of hopes and anxieties? Can humanity really save itself like this, or is the whole thing intolerably corrupt from the start, stuffed with oil lobbyists, cynical politicians and tech bros?<br /> Our guide is an AI-cloned version of the filmmaker, whose sometimes deadpan, sometimes despairing voiceover drifts us past the oil-funded skyscrapers, pristine superhighways and elite backroom cocktail parties where the powerful do their deals.<br /> Deep inside the insane techno-utopian fantasy of Dubai and the end-times irony of a petrostate’s oil baron hosting our last-chance climate conference in a burning hot desert, the mood is of end-times alienation and hopelessness. But then we encounter the unexpected: indigenous voices that cut through the business-as-usual with an urgent plea from the frontline of brutal climate injustice. <br /> Playful, critical, all too human, COLOSSAL WRECK takes us into a half-imagined future space of what we could be if we managed to listen differently – and the darkness of what happens next if we don’t.

Director: Josh Appignanesi

Year: 2023

What does it take for us to act on the climate crisis – especially if we’re the kind of person who should already be acting? In this funny, relatable portrait, a concerned yet ineffectual dad finds the first step is letting those unbearable feelings of climate anxiety in, instead of pushing them aside. But as he meets others like him, he discovers how oil-backed propagandists funded our denial and paralysis. He sets out to unmask the vested interests responsible, helping raise a generation’s leading authors in a vibrant chorus.<br /> MY EXTINCTION is a revealingly honest account of how to feel your feelings, act on your privilege, and get active when threatened with extinction.

Director: Josh Appignanesi

Year: 2018

The Tate Gallery recently staged a retrospective of the surrealist Leonora Carrington (1917- 2011), famously the lover of Max Ernst. Novelist Chloe Aridjis, who knew the artist from her native Mexico, was made guest curator of the exhibition. Set between the real-life curation of the Tate show and something more fantasised, FEMALE HUMAN ANIMAL sees Chloe increasingly disappointed by her milieu - and increasingly haunted by Carrington’s strange artworks. <br /> When an elusive, brooding man seems to offer more, Chloe begins to pursue him, but is she hunter, or hunted? Enabled by Carrington’s own defiantly mysterious mythology, she descends into a world of obsession.<br /> Shot on a rare '80s video camera with a unique look, and deftly weaving fact and fiction, the film offers a darkly romantic fantasia of a woman who goes beyond societal norms, putting on screen the lurid unconscious of our new sexual politics.<br /> Official Selection BAFICI Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival 2018 - World premiere