Perestroika

Director: Sarah Turner

Year: 2016

In 2012, the Ivy House pub in Peckham was sold to property developers as part of the ongoing gentrification of south London. The locals opposed it. Unfolding from this scenario, the film weaves verbatim testament into folk operatic form with the Ivy House itself, embodied and imagined as a central character and inhabited by the memories of the generations who have passed through its doors. Sarah Turner films the community’s creative reanimation of the mourned pub through dance, poetry and song... which both records and creates a vision of social possibility... The activism that saved the pub is a metaphor for social and creative agency. This is not just a film about resistance; it is a film that itself refuses categorisation... a triumphant genre-blending documentary which turns community action into an exhilarating participatory opera. (London Film Festival)<br /> Public House premiered in the documentary competition at the 2015 BFI London Film Festival and was nominated for the Grierson Award. The film has since been re-edited and remastered in a new version for wider audiences.

Director: Sarah Turner

Year: 2008

Ecology is a feature film in three parts, three characters and three stories to be screened in any order: the stories of a mother, a daughter and a son, on holiday in Majorca. This is not the Majorca of package holidays but a writer's retreat, in a location solar powered and environmentally responsible. Delivered as three internal monologues narrated as voice-over, we are caught in the rhythms of an urgent repetition of events past and scraps of imagined dialogue directed at but never spoken to an other. Appearing to reference a debate on the ethics of the environment, Ecology innovatively turns the idea towards the ethics of psychic recycling, the debris passed on and re-circulated among people.

Director: Sarah Turner

Year: 2000

A woman travels to a bar to meet her date. As the evening falls short of her expectation she returns home alone. Shot with an extraordinary visual and lyrical complexity, Cut tracks the path of the woman's psyche as events unravel, culminating in a ritual of astonishing intensity.