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Departing from a time of coloniality shared by foreign and local powers, where overthrowing a regime is not sufficient to break the shackles that bind.
Framed by a screening of the Victor Jara Collective’s seminal work of political documentary The Terror and the Time (1979) and Moustapha Alassane’s irreverant animated satire Bon Voyage Sim (1966)
Departing from the Syrian Revolution, before moving through other moments of revolution and experiments in autonomy from 1936 Spain, Angola, and Palestine, to the Paris Commune, the essay film Mapping Lessons reflects on attempts to dismantle the forces of neocolonialism, both internal and external, in the hopes of preparing for the next time.
Writer and filmmker Philip Rizk is joined by Orsod Malik, Executive Director of the Stuart Hall Foundation, and Mai Taha, Assistant Professor in Human Rights at LSE to explore the work of political philosopher and psychiatrist Franz Fanon through the lens of the region he was radicalised in.
A programme of new cinema inspired by the hallucinogenic properties of flowers, archival dissonance, and tales of a grumpy entity who talked only because it could not growl.
Streetwise hustler Antonio wanders the streets of Buenos Aires in search of money and sex – taking lovers to bed and stealing from them as they sleep. Only his tempestuous mother provides the force that may one day push him to leave the city towards new, alternative forms of happiness. Sacha Amaral’s debut feature is a searing, slow-motion portrait of hedonism and discovery overflowing with characters who sink fully and luxuriously into their authentic selves.
In the aftermath of a conspiracy-minded father’s sudden death, his daughter inherits his patent for an experimental healing device. Featuring archives from Callie Hernandez’s late father, Invention explores the process of grieving a complicated parent; the ‘fictions and fantasies that follow loss, allowing us to bear disappointment both as individuals and publics in times of national decline’
In the mind of an eleven year old girl, a single phone call erases her entire life. Iva Radivojevic’s subtle drama reconstructs fragments of childhood memory to trace currents of loss and trauma that followed her family’s displacement from the former Yugoslavia. With a dreamlike structure and a wistful, unsettling atmosphere, When The Phone Rang unearths dissonant relationships between history and memory.
Two participatory art projects from the North East where young people were asked to consider their perception of, and experiences in, local communities in Wooler, Northumberland and Byker, Newcastle. The young artists worked with a filmmaker to explore the rich archives of their local areas, uncovering histories and thinking about their identities in relation to notions of place.
Curated by artist-filmmaker Gail Pickering, Unsettled Grounds brings together works by graduates of the Goldsmiths MA Artists’ Film & Moving Image, each engaging with landscapes in states of transformation—whether shaped by environmental change, personal histories, or industrial decline.
Unfolding over a single night’s journey into morning, Nightshift (1981) distills the comings and goings of a hotel foyer into an eerie series of moods.
