The Try Out

Director: James Hosken, Katie Eggleston, Lauren Fitzpatrick, Mimi Harmer

Year: 2025

An interactive stationary VR experience that invites quiet reflection on nature, slowness, and change. It offers a moment to sit, observe, and influence the atmosphere in a peaceful, dreamlike virtual world. The experience places the audience on a hilltop, looking across at a lone tree gently swaying in the breeze on another hill. The audience can move their hands gently to influence the wind. The seasons cycle over the course of ten minutes, the visual and audio aesthetics shifting with the changes. The piece emerged from thinking about how nature changes quietly around us, often unnoticed. We invite the audience to consider how small gestures and moments connect us to the world’s larger cycles, and how ephemeral and fragile those cycles are.

Director: Daniel Mann

Year: 2026

Drawing on a location test filmed in Uganda and an email exchange with the scout, this short film captures cinema’s ties to land and its entanglement with colonial imaginaries, binding the fiction of filmmaking with state-building. Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2026 - Forum Expanded - World premiere

Director: Benjamin Wigley

Year: 2024

A film of myth, mask, and folklore inspired by the Carboniferous, imbued with folksong, and forged by the blacksmith, WAYS OF THE PLANT interweaves art and nature through hand-processed 16mm film and multidisciplinary artist practice that explores humanity's deep connection to ancient woods and the journey of coal. Hart of the Wood 'Ways of the Plant', is a bold multidisciplinary art and film project, led by artist and filmmaker Benjamin Wigley, which celebrates humanity's ingrained relationship with the woods that spans deep time; carbon, the Carboniferous and the journey of coal. Working collaboratively with the Hart of the Wood artist collective, Ben responded to the Lapworth’s extensive Carboniferous fossil collection to create a new multi-modal film and art exhibition at the Lapworth Museum of Geology; on display throughout 2023