Combined Programme: a river holds a perfect memory

Event has passed ICA,

Notes From Brook House
Alex Nevill | 2025 | UK | 28’ | Digital | English spoken

Airports, detention centres, sea containers. Slow, roaming shots linger on places of passage and confinement, where movement is measured and controlled. Fragments of stories, words passed from one person to another. Encounters along the way reveal different ways of seeing, different ways of understanding.

Voices emerge, sharing stories from those held inside Brook House, a large immigration centre on London’s outskirts. Through shifting perspectives, the film examines migration, control, and the space between perception and reality.

Languid and immersive, a river holds a perfect memory is an itinerant exploration of the interplay between human life and bodies of water as they relate to mobility and the Anthropocene. Contrasting disparate but interlinked sites, we drift between archival imagery of industrialising Lancashire and recent diaristic footage shot on Jamaican waterways – from sunlit raft meanders by day, to the depths of bioluminescent lagoons at night. Grounding questions surface amidst a textured organic soundscape, with the film bearing witness to the reservoirs of memories, racialised histories and transformative labour practices contained within waterways.

Okay Keskidee! Let Me See Inside
Rhea Storr | 2025 | UK | 19’ | Digital | Sound

Okay Keskidee! Let Me See Inside is a love letter to the UK Caribbean diaspora, exploring black histories, physical spaces and notions of community. The site of the Keskidee Centre, a pioneering Afro-Caribbean cultural centre, is now occupied by luxury apartments. The closure of such valued spaces where people could gather and organise coincided with the rise of a political discourse which led to a lack of documentation of Black Caribbean pasts. Working on the surface of the film image itself – making use of a rostrum camera and optical printer – filmmaker Rhea Storr reflects on the histories that remain trapped in the archive and how capitalism has affected our connection to the past.

Followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers.

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