Project Detail

Unseen: The Lives of Looking

Synopsis

’Unseen: The Lives of Looking’ focuses on four individuals with a distinct relationship to looking - an eye surgeon, a planetary explorer, a human rights lawyer and an artist/filmmaker. Told through Dryden Goodwin’s closely observed drawings, camera work and multilayered soundtrack, it explores different scales, forms and reasons for looking, in a poetic and metaphysically charged journey. Revealing the empathy and dexterity of an eye surgeon, working with the fragile human eye; the quest of a NASA planetary explorer to decode the cosmos and find evidence of life on Mars; and the scrutiny of the British government, by a human rights lawyer, in extraordinary rendition, drone attack and mass surveillance cases. The film’s perspectives range from minute details to panoramic expanses, building an atmospheric and sensual matrix around its subjects. Goodwin includes fleeting vignettes of strangers and a brief focus on his father and son, highlighting the tension in his work between intimacy and anonymity. The film considers both the physical act of looking and how we perceive the world around us: how we contemplate the known and the unknown, the personal and the remote and the imaginative leaps taken to reveal what might be concealed or out of sight.

Details

Year
2015
Type of project
Features
Running time
90 mins
Format
4K video
Director
Dryden Goodwin 1st Feature
Producer
Jo Cole, Sarah Caddy
Co-Producer
Dryden Goodwin Projects, Red Bee Media
Executive Producer
Gareth Evans
Editor
Dryden Goodwin, Jo Cole
Screenwriter
Dryden Goodwin
Director of Photography
Dryden Goodwin
Sound
Dryden Goodwin
Composer
Dryden Goodwin
Principal cast
Prof Sir Peng Tee Khaw, Prof Sanjeev Gupta, Rosa Curling, Jeffrey Goodwin, Fynn Cole-Goodwin
Researchers
Jo Cole, Imran Perretta
Production managers
Harriet Masterson, Sukey Richardson
Production, Camera and Sound Assistants
Brada Barassi, Imran Perretta
Sound Mastering
Tony Perretta
Production Lawyer
Guy Swillingham
Production accountants
Perlin Franco Ltd
Funded by
Royal Museums Greenwich, Arts Council England, Wellcome Trust, Red Bee Media

Production Status

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.

Alongside Alongside

Director: Dryden Goodwin

Year: 2019

An inquiry into proximity and empathy, explored through the working life of a care worker as he builds supportive relationships with three young adults with severe physical disabilities and autism.

A woman in a wedding dress holding a bouquet sits on a green armchair, smiling at the camera Anak Where Did We Stay?

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).

A hand rests on two metal wires in an underground mine. An electrical box is above. A head torch shines onto the rock face. Moving Sound

Director: Sadia Pineda Hameed

Year: 2025

MOVING SOUND is a speculative work set across 1980s and near-future Wales, shot on super 16mm. In the film, sounds of present day anti-colonial and anti-capitalist strategies for mining strikes are transmitted from Soundcamp streamboxes to the past via an underground, time travelling broadcast. In the 1980s, workers build DIY receivers from Moving Sound portable audio devices, which they use to distribute the broadcast around sites of production and the everyday. First screened in the King Coal Experience (an immersive recreation of the Big Pit underground mine) amidst disused mining machinery, MOVING SOUND blurs fictional 16mm and archival 8mm footage of sonic action to explore how organising converges and enacts across geographies, temporality, fantasy and reality.