As chilling as it is absurd, Kamal Aljafari’s Paradiso repurposes found footage from Israeli military propaganda and turns it into a fictional drama of men playing at war. Aljafari takes the title from a short story by Borges and describes the work as a “cinematic self-portrait” – questioning our interpretation of screen violence, its relationship to real-world horrors, and troubling our positionality as spectators.
A quiet, atmospheric portrait of an elderly store owner in the small town of Yagi, Kyoto Prefecture. Yu Araki’s camera carefully observes the curiously named Mr. Yagi’s daily routine and interactions with local customers during the last autumn season for his shop, which is no longer in business. Documenting the passage of time in parallel with processes of depopulation, the title Tempo conjures a double meaning; playing on the Japanese word “tenpo (店舗)” which means “store”.
SCREENTIME brings together Everyday Apocalypse (2020) and In10ded Ten: The Fate of The Middle Place (2021), two short films made by young Berwick filmmakers – Kyra, Sam, Jaimee, Ben and Christopher, Ebba, Lara, Violet with Kimberly O’Neil. Through a series of online and in-person workshops, the filmmakers experimented with digital filmmaking and documentary techniques to produce films exploring the relationship between people, technology, and the local environment.
Belgian filmmaker and cinematographer Fairuz Ghammam’s warm, generous work explores aspects of (auto)biography, shared authorship, and collaborative practices.
Staged as a walk through her hometown, Kortrijk, Culture riffs on these themes, sewing kernels of family history through a narrative, and a gaze, that oscillates between private and public space. How many memories and storylines can coexist?
Drawing on the filmmaker’s experiences growing up in a large Samoan family in the largely Pākehā populated region of Nelson, Hidden Amongst Clouds newly imagines stories of Samoan mythology and questions the moral virtues they uphold. The work embraces a 1990’s aesthetic, harking back to supernatural fantasy television series and their embedded symbolisms, reflecting Ulutupu’s ongoing interest in themes of belonging and the importance of recontextualising and reimagining narratives of colonial stereotypes.
Nedarma (Travelling) is a documentary focusing on the Nenets, a nomadic tribe in the northern tundra of Siberia which Anastasia Lapsui was born into. Sumptuous 35mm black and white cinematography captures the landscapes of the Yamal Peninsula and the daily activities of its inhabitants with patience, a visionary perspective and a captivating soundtrack. The film begins by illustrating the Nenets cosmology as a way of leading into a filmic structure that portrays the arc of life from birth to death.
Meriem Bennani’s playful sci-fi trilogy mixes live action, day-glo animation, and a kaleidoscopic score by Fatima Al Qadiri to explore the entangled politics of immigration, state control, and the border zone. Episodes focus on inhabitants of the fictional island of CAPS (short for ‘capsule’), a magnetically sealed megalopolis created to intercept refugees attempting to teleport illegally into the US. Citizens work together to develop new modes of defiance and resistance, harnessing not only emergent biotechnologies but also the liberatory potential of joy and humour.
The isolated mountainous region of Tusheti, in Northeast Georgia, is the site for a reflection on the importance of ritual, the maintenance of community ties, and how modernisation and migration are transforming rural landscapes. Shot over several years, Let Us Flow uses inovative audio-visual techniques to make visible the symbolic and physical division of sacred spaces within the community and offers a nuanced perspective on a culture where ancestral shrines are only accessible to men.
A programme of short works traversing hallucinatory dreamscapes, contested landscapes, and the precarious movements of bodies through time and space. Argentinian auteur Lucrecia Martel screens alongside contemporary artists, Basim Magdy, Marwa Arsanios and Fox Maxy.
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Three short works by young filmmakers in Berwick, made collaboratively with artists Kimberley O’Neill and Kathryn Elkin. Applying techniques of digital filmmaking and documentary storytelling, the films explore entangled relationships between people, technology and the local environment.
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In Inuit, the word meaning to bring forth a poem is the same as the word to breathe – an act that inspires Finnish filmmaker Markku Lehmuskallio’s poetic ethnography, co-directed with his son Johannes Lehmuskallio. A beautifully expansive film centred on performance and the importance of song, Anerca, Breath of life was shot over several decades with the indigenous peoples of the Arctic Circle. People and cultures spanning the borders of Finland, Sweden, Norway, Greenland, Canada, Alaska and Russia, the filmmakers are clear to point out, “It wasn’t these cultures that drew up these borders, rights have been violated.” Speaking against these continued infractions, the film magnificently expresses the joy, pain and energy of these individuals and communities through fleeting, magical moments of performance, conversation and cinema.
After a day at the movies, it’s time to get up, get down, and get on out to party with Miss Mobile Disco – Edinburgh’s finest Mobile DJ, serving up killer cocktails of disco, funk, soul, 80’s and feel good party gems!
Christopher Ulutupu is an artist of Samoan/Niuean/German descent currently residing in Wellington. Through a richly pop, queer and celebratory Pacific lens he creates new narrative forms opening up conversations around collaboration, connection, and disconnection. The Pleasures of Unbelonging is a new commission presented by CIRCUIT with support from TAUTAI, Creative New Zealand and BFMAF. Following its world premiere screening Christopher will be in conversation with May Adadol Ingawanij, Professor of Cinematic Arts at University of Westminster.
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A series of hypnotic, fragmentary encounters reflecting on creativity, desire, identity and transformation. Forms of transgressive potentiality are explored through poppers training videos, VHS tapes documenting an esoteric musical subculture, and a night of ritual shapeshifting in a Boston parking lot.
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Inner and outer space interpolate in this series of films exploring relational dynamics between public and private worlds. Instagram filters, YouTube tutorials, dating apps and a wearable eye tracker become interfaces through which to perceive shifting notions of bodily autonomy in contemporary life.
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What is to be done when our homes and our dreams have been invaded? Graeme Arnfield’s nightmarish essay film traces the curious history of the doorbell, from its invention and reinventions through 19th century labour struggles, to the nascent years of narrative cinema and contemporary surveillance cultures. Home Invasion paints a terrifying portrait of technological ideologies and imaginaries shaping our everyday lives, staging a confrontation with the reality of machines and systems that work against us, hindering the emergence of radical futures.
Personal, geological and collective histories are reencountered through this series of films. A reckoning is at the core of Myrid Carten’s candid portrait of familial ties in Sorrow had a baby. While the caverns of a corpse mountain become the place and wonder for a curious eye in Rita Morais’ 16mm film Há ouro em todo o lado, where a child’s play and voice relay sage observations of its past transformation. Afro-Diasporic underground disco, house and ballroom culture is source and inspiration for the blissful and rapturous worldmaking within India Sky Davis’ The Lifecycle of Rainbows.
Descendants is presented in collaboration with the MA Artists’ Film & Moving Image at Goldsmiths University of London, selected by artist filmmaker and programme director Gail Pickering.
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An in-person screening-performance by award-winning Iranian artist, Maryam Tafakory, whose textual and filmic collages interweave poetry, documentary, archival, and found material.
“To the outsiders, the bystanders, the virtual onlookers, to the disaster capitalist, the hopeless, the failed revolutionist—from wherever you are standing, come a step closer and listen as we try to rewind, to fast forward, to pause, to look away…”
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Three concentrated doses of cinematic pleasure. Artists in this programme meditate on storytelling and agency, synthesising practices of filmmaking and living to suggest new forms of intergenerational care. The ways we interpret our collective selves are explored through tender engagements with technologies of record and remembrance.
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Drawing on a wealth of unseen archival material and unpublished notebooks, Being in a Place weaves a complex and personal portrait of Margaret Tait’s life, from the perspective of a fellow artist sensitive to the potential Margaret envisaged for film as a poetic medium. At the centre of the film is an imagining of an unrealised script for a feature film discovered amongst Margaret’s documents in Orkney titled, Heartlandscape: Being in a place – a document of a landscape, and of a journey through it.
A combined programme featuring Huw Lemmey and Onyeka Igwe’s lyrical reflection on intimacy and surveillance through the development of British espionage, and Manuel Muñoz Rivas’ transporting voyage across an expanse of water, half-light and darkness.
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From the beginning of 2021, as the UK continued to confront the Covid pandemic, staff working in one North East England care home were invited to film their everyday lives. Care leads us through the ups and downs of life in the home over 12 months through the eyes, words, and newly learnt camera skills of those working and living there. As residents celebrate their own milestones, from 100th birthdays to winning at bingo and enjoy Christmas parties and VE Day, the film gives a joyful, challenging, and emotional insight into life, love and loss inside the home during and beyond the worst days of the pandemic.
