Joy, It's Nina

Director: Jane Thorburn

Year: 2023

A Magic Realist Documentary. The film weaves together real and mythical events to create connections between the history of the Crystal Palace in London and the sculpture called Psyche Abandoned. The story reveals how a moment in the life of a young woman called Psyche was captured in marble and travelled through time and space to sit in the same park overlooking South London for the last 170 years, while world wars, fires, explosions, royalty, music events, funfairs and circuses have rushed past her in endless succession. This ‘moment’ is the only constant in a story of splendour and spectacle, and like all the best stories, if only half of it is true it is still an incredible tale.

Director: Jane Thorburn

Year: 2019

The writer Deborah Levy imagines a lost lecture written by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis.  It investigates an hysterical woman dancing through time, snow leopards lapping milk in the kitchen of Freud’s last house, and a journey under the ground on a ghost train.

Director: Luca Anzalone

Year: 2026

Caught between her indigenous Buryat roots—where art is a shamanic window between worlds—and a Western market that treats culture as a commodity, artist Yuma Radne constructs a monumental canvas to confront the psychological distortions of colonization at the edge of an irreversible era. "Either you make art, or you suffer. It’s like a curse." For painter Yuma Radne, the act of creation is not an aesthetic choice, but an ancestral code carried in the blood. Moving from a remote Siberian village to the high-stakes European art world, Yuma finds herself navigating a surreal landscape where sacred cultural identity is rapidly converted into a luxury product. Through intimate studio dialogues and raw philosophical reflections, the film captures the gruelling physical and mental labour behind her graduation masterpiece, The End of Times. Centred around a gargantuan erupting booze (a traditional Buryat dumpling) mutated into an absurd, monumental symbol of a colonised and erased national identity, the film transcends a typical artist portrait. It becomes a vital, cosmic meditation on why humanity continues to create art in the face of systemic collapse—and a powerful testament to an indigenous culture refusing to be reduced to a souvenir.