The Time Before

Director: Leo Metcalf

Year: 2024

Olly sifts through his memories searching to understand why he is the way he is. The narrative swings between two contrasting worlds: his memories of his first years, captured by his childhood drawings, and surreal underwater live-action scenes representing his dreams. We witness fragmented memories of a torn family - an abusive father, a mother whose memory seems faded, and a sister, Sally, encouraging her little brother to escape through imagination and dreams. As memory and fantasy blur, The Time Before becomes a meditation on the stories we tell ourselves to survive, and what is lost in the telling. Official Selection Aesthetica Film Festival 2024

Director: Kemi-Bo Miller Jacobs

Year: 2026

Mary, a young mixed-race librarian, becomes convinced that a neighbour’s St George’s Cross is connected to her growing anxiety and disrupted sleep. As her unease intensifies, she struggles to distinguish reality from perception and must find the courage to speak up before she begins to unravel.

Director: Sadia Pineda Hameed

Year: 2026

ANAK WHERE DID WE STAY? is a five-channel film by Sadia Pineda Hameed that brings together The Box’s home movie collection and the artist’s personal/family collection. Rasheed Araeen’s chakras, spouting waves, Beatlesmania, a basking shark, hula dance, an Enoch Powell protest, tidal islands and seafoam floating into the air—the archives converge across time to tell the story of the artist’s mother’s migration from one archipelago to another: the Philippines to the British Isles. The film becomes a gathering site for personal and collective experiences of journeys, resilience and belonging. Road trips unexpectedly reenact the archive, footage finds itself out of context, voices commentate the film as if rewatching a home movie together; mimesis, associations and autonomy are central to the retelling. As camcorders became more accessible from the 1970s onwards, home movies were an unconscious means to rebuild personal archives after colonial displacement, extraction and erasure. ANAK WHERE DID WE STAY?, named after the home movie from The Box’s archive 'Perranporth Where Did We Stay?', unfolds as a conversation between the artist and her mother, exploring the three interconnected journeys of migration, holidays and remembering. Produced as part of The Box’s Reimagining the Film Archive programme (BFI Screen Heritage Fund).