a river holds a perfect memory
Water, labour, migration and diasporic memory coalesce in a transporting essay film connecting Jamaica and the UK. Assemblages of archival footage, 16mm and LIDAR scans mobilise water as a medium through which to connect disparate people across the flow of time and against the persistence of colonial erasures.
Programmer’s Note
Verdant, watery landscapes of Jamaica shine with radiance in Hope Strickland’s latest work, contrasting with archival footage of industrial Britain to explore different potentialities of water as a transporting and transformational force. Its soft gurgle is accompanied by chimes and birdsong, cultivating an atmosphere of gentle repose. As we journey down a river led by a tour guide, we are invited to listen by our captain. He asks “do we hold ancestral memories in our bodies?”, an invitation to reflect on diaspora and dislocation.
~ Myriam Mouflih
Director Biography
Hope Strickland is an artist-filmmaker and researcher from Manchester, UK with British-Jamaican heritage. Her work sits at the intersection of experimental film and documentary practices, moving across archival, analogue and digital formats in order to quietly sit across from and outside of time. Her practice wrestles with violence, disparate colonial landscapes and attempts to ask how we might live in a world and relate to one another with care whilst amongst and against systems of power and control.
Hope’s work has screened internationally at film festivals including the 59th New York Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Scotland and Exis Experimental Film Festival, Seoul. She was awarded the 2023 Aesthetica Emerging Art Prize.
Director Filmography
a river holds a perfect memory (2024), Holdings (2023), I’ll Be Back! (2022), If I could name you myself (I would hold you forever) (2021), Home Soon Come (2020)