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Bill Douglas Award 1: Suspended Futures – Programme Notes
This programme looks at futures dreamt of and futures taken away in contexts of immigration, exposing wider inequalities and tragedies. A Haitian father’s loss and imagination are complicated by a single cassette recording in the poetic Dreams like paper boats, while the captivating and almost strangling cinematography of I promise you paradise immerses us in the love and refuge story…
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Kino-Pravda
This programme is curated and co-presented by Matevž Jerman from FEKK Short Film Festival (Slovenia) and will be live scored by Scottish musician Gerard Black. Presented in partnership with The Skinny, and with the help of the Austrian Film Museum. 50% of the ticket income for this event will be donated to the Support Filmmakers At…
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Santiago Àlvarez
In the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, one of the greatest challenges was how to educate the population in the ideals and potential embodied by the revolutionary process. Due to the massive inequalities which had prevailed under the Batista regime, many of the population were illiterate, and film was determined to be one…
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Eco-spectrality: Residual Fabulations & Tentacular Frequencies
Despite the ingeniously bogus stories of dolphins taking over Venice’s “clean” canals and our temporary re-attunement with the sounds of the more-than-human in silent quarantined cities, we are still rapidly driving towards ecological collapse and mass extinction, with a shared sense of apathy. Are we perhaps entering an eco-hangover or eco-frustration, driven by the restrictions…
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The End
One world ends and another begins… Despite what Hollywood spectacle-making would have us believe, apocalyptic disasters are not a one-size-fits-all, universal experience. The COVID-19 pandemic is the most recent case study of inequality at the end of the world. While many people found themselves made physically, mentally and socially vulnerable in 2020, with the loss…
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Techno-Fix: Obscured Connections & By Extension
Discourse around contemporary technologies more often than not tends to be split across two opposing camps: techno-optimists and a solutionist belief that tech can help overcome all big issues facing humanity and the planet, versus techno-sceptics, attuned to the inevitable corruption that capitalism, state and corporate control bring to any new tech development. While current…
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No New Normal: Absurdity of Labour, Monitored & Alt Worlds
WFH FTW! Not really though, but while everyone in makeshift office set-ups at home, navigating family, flatmates and/or loneliness, will have had a hard time over the last year, it is nothing compared to the many who were forced to go into work in unsafe conditions due to the UK government’s failures and warped priorities,…
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Barbed Wire Love: Artists, Filmmakers and their North of Ireland Troubles
Fifty-three years since the commencement of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, Barbed Wire Love presents intimate tales from those who stayed, those who left and those who passed through. Sisters and brothers, those who danced at raves, those who had good intentions and those who did not. Chance encounters, intimate first-person cinema and the unreliability of history…
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Hush-A-Bye Baby
Goretti, Majella, Sinead and Dinky are four school friends living in the catholic ghettos of the Bogside and Creggan estates in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1984. At the age of 15 they are full of youthful exuberance and boys feature largely in their interests. When Goretti meets Ciarán at an Irish language class a romance…
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Scottish Animation: Abstraction & Experimentation
Curated for Anim18 – a UK-wide celebration of British animation – by Ross Hogg, and marking the centenary of Orcadian filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait, this programme showcases Scottish animations that play with the form and structure of filmmaking. Story is not the driving force. Instead, we are treated to a series of visual delights where subtlety can…
