Pastoral Malaise
Synopsis
Details
- Year
- 2022
- Type of project
- Shorts
- Running time
- 11 mins 22 sec
- Format
- 16mm
- Director
-
Ufuoma Essi
- Producer
- Ufuoma Essi
- Editor
- Ufuoma Essi
- Screenwriter
- Ufuoma Essi
- Director of Photography
- Mark Gee
- Sound
- Ines Adriana
- Composer
- Dorris Henderson
- Principal cast
- Voice Cast: Angela Wynter, starring: Janet Babirye, Dorcas Nsubuga, Raejaun Ruddock Williams
- Wardrobe
- Academy Costumes
- Colourist
- Thierry Phung
- Casting
- Nambi Kiyira, Shamica Ruddock
- Production Assistance
- Nambi Kiyira, Shamica Ruddock
Genre
Categories
Production Status
Production Company
Co-commissioned by LUX and Independent Cinema Office, using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England
Page updates
This page was last updated on 12th May 2025. Please let us know if we need to make any amendments or request edit access by clicking below.
See also
You may also be interested in other relevant projects in the database.
Half Memory
Director: Ufuoma Essi
Year: 2024
Using Toni Morrison’s ‘The Site of Memory’ as a starting point for interrogation, HALF MEMORY is a languid meditation on memory, conurbations, isolation, and the histories we live among. Oscillating between years, cities, and unfolding images, the film is an examination of the present as an artefact of the past. Shot on Super8 and filmed between the US, France and the UK over a period of years. Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2025
Is My Living in Vain
Director: Ufuoma Essi
Year: 2023
A meditation on the continuing history and emancipatory potential of the Black church as a space of diasporic belonging, affirmation and community organising. The film examines churches as spaces of 'infrapolitics' by exploring the sonic, political, spiritual and existential connections between specific communities. Official Selection Black Star Film Festival 2023 Official Selection Hot Docs Festival 2023 Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 2024
Mystis
Director: Tatiana Collet Apraxine
Year: 2028
You awaken on a fog-shrouded shoreline and meet Echo, a strange child with a hole in their stomach. Together you cross a lantern festival where the veil between worlds is thinnest, sail into an ocean that opens beneath you, and descend through a portal into the Underworld. The Underworld moves through different facets of grief: a rave where silhouettes dance in slow motion, indifferent to Echo's attempts to reach them; a frozen sea where giant statues crack open to release a buried memory of a lost mother; a shadow theatre where an anger monster is unleashed, reducing everything to embers. From the embers, a boat carries you into a vast darkness, where Mother appears, and they are finally reunited. You sail together to the Tree of Life, a bioluminescent, cosmic jungle. Echo begs her to return to the World of the Living, but ancestors appear and surround you. She cannot come back - the journey was never about bringing her back. Echo, revealed to be your own child self, dissolves around you as the hole fills with light.