Projects matching: Steven Eastwood

Synopsis

Co-created by the a group autistic directors, the Neurocultures Collective, (Sam Chown-Ahern, Georgia Bradburn, Benjamin Brown, Robin Elliott-Knowles, Lucy Walker) and artist-filmmaker Steven Eastwood, THE STIMMING POOL is a hybrid film that enters the possibilities of a world informed by neurodiverse perspectives. The film reflects a spectrum of autistic experience, and it’s drifting form is built around the concept of an autistic camera, whose curiosity discovers a relay of subjects who stray through the world, revealing environments often hostile to autistic experience - such as a hectic workplace and a crowded pub - and quiet spaces that offer respite from them. Each character exists in an apparently separate world. Some are concealing being autistic and dealing with feelings of isolation, others thrive in the communities around them. But gradually we come to realise they have a shared objective: to find a place uninhibited by the tests and restrictions of normative society: this is the Stimming Pool.
Official selection CPH:DOX 2024 Special Premieres - World premiere
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2024

Synopsis

This installation investigates the connections between repetitive stimming behaviours that are common in autism, the earliest forms of moving images and contemporary digital art.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2024

Synopsis

Across the water on the island, four individuals experience the end of life. Showing rarely seen and intensely private events, the film follows the progression of illness for each character and, for one, the last days and hours of life, the moment of death, and after death care. A lyrical, slow cinema description of the temporality and phenomena of dying, this film sensitively witnesses the transition away from personhood.
This is a palliative island, the Isle of Wight, an enigmatic landscape where all around rituals persist. Parallel to bedside vigils and the rhythm of breathing, we see rescue owls on the hospice ward, the rugged coastline, and the constant ferry arrivals. A choir rehearses Brahm’s 'German Requiem'. In the hospital pathology lab, microscopic close-ups of cancer show the interior of the bodies, our biology, our creatureliness. Death is presented as natural and everyday but also unspeakable and strange.
Official Selection Rotterdam International Film Festival 2018 - International premiere

Synopsis

Part documentary, part drama, Buried Land tells the story of ordinary people attempting to realize a dream. Two actors cut a path through the real community and strange reality of Visoko, the small town at the heart of a remarkable claim: the discovery of ancient pyramids in central Bosnia.

Emir is a Bosnian immigrant, removed during the war and now struggling to rediscover his homeland. He has returned to assist an American director in the making of a film about Visoko's pyramids. Everyone in the town is asked to participate, including Avdija, a tourist agent with the Pyramid Foundation, Semir Osmanagi, the quixotic founder of the Valley of the Pyramids, and Zombi, who oversees the digging of the labyrinthine tunnels found beneath the hills.
 
Emir and his director are accused by the press of being like 'Borat in Bosnia', seeking to mock the town's believers. Emir's outlandish behavior grows more excessive and confused, culminating in a grandiose shoot at the summit of the Moon Pyramid that descends into chaos. He is taken into the heart of the Pyramid of the Sun, where he is forced to confront his beliefs. Where does fact end and fiction begin?

Synopsis

Of Camera explores the abortive attempts of two people to be together in the same space. Their disagreement is fuelled by technical difference: the woman exists on videotape and the man on celluloid. The story corrupts as the two realise they are incompatible and that they are being filmed and watched.