The Gift

Director: Karen Russo

Year: 2005

ECONOMY OF EXCESS is comprised of footage of the sewage pipes of Essex, shot by a small robot camera that is normally used to locate blockages. The film creates an entrancing movement into the ever-expanding circles of a subterranean parallel universe, which mutates into a hypnotizing voyage of impressionistic colour and light. Humble in its origins yet dazzling in its effects, this video epitomizes the way in which the work continually straddles the line between the sublime and the mundane, turning society’s excess into a spiritual initiation journey.

Director: Evan Ifekoya

Year: 2025

MODUPE is an experimental documentary that unfolds as a ceremony of queer belonging, inheritance, and sound. At its heart is a dialogue with Afro-Cuban priestess and musician Amelia Pedroso, whose legacy is invoked through archival traces, letters, and performance. Narrated as a letter to an ancestor, the film situates the search for connection within an interior, oceanic dreamscape where water, memory, and ritual become both setting and subject. Cinematically, MODUPE moves between a stylised ensemble rehearsal and a sacred library-archive. The ensemble of voice, drum, and dance provides the film’s pulse, collapsing rehearsal and ritual into one. Deep blue light, reflective surfaces, and submerged imagery create a sensorial architecture that is both intimate and expansive, with water presence throughout evoking both flood and transformation. Formally, the film resists linear storytelling, privileging atmosphere, rhythm, and sonic immersion. Objects, archives, and sacred materials hold the same cinematic weight as bodies in performance, reframing the archive as altar and sound as shrine. Narrative unfolds through resonance rather than resolution, drawing the viewer into a space of listening and reflection. MODUPE proposes cinema as a vessel for inheritance, where identity is fluid, memory is alive and liberation is lived through sound.

Director: Peter Todd

Year: 2025

Thoughts in a notebook as a string of images. Made to celebrate Close-Up cinema, London. Premiere. Close-Up Year 20. 6.7.2025. Close-Up Cinema, London.