The Wind Is Taking Them

Ann Carolin Renninger / 2023 / Germany / 25’ / Digital / German spoken, English subtitles

Artist filmmaker Ann Carolin Renninger follows the daily rhythms, rituals and fascinations of three people – Rovin, Maria, and Christopher – whose rural domestic spaces appear to them as sites of endless wonder. In his remote home on the Baltic Sea, Rovin searches the skies, fire and moss for the origins of the cosmos, illustrating his findings with drawings of microbes and asteroid belts. Maria, a petrologist, examines the individual components and molecular arrangements of the stones she collects from the beach, whilst Christopher determinedly hauls rocks up onto a hill to construct a stone circle. Through her gentle observation, Renninger presents their investigations in geological time. As Maria observes: “for a stone, a human lifetime is like a breath.”

Leisure, Utopic 

Beatrice Gibson / 2024 / Italy, UK / 3’ / Digital / English spoken

The first episode in a series of “adaptations” of poet Bernadette Mayer’s book Utopia that artist Beatrice Gibson envisions to undertake over the next decade, producing a series of small, quotidian films that together, and over time, will constitute an epic. This first film is drawn from Chapter 4, entitled “The Arrangement: of Houses & Buildings, Birth, Death, Money, Schools, Dentists, Birth Control, Work, Air, Remedies, and So on” and was shot at home during the pandemic.

Notes: Remembered and Found 

Maria Anastassiou / 2024 / Cyprus, UK / 28’ / Digital / Greek spoken, English subtitles 

“The archival kaleidoscope of Notes: Remembered and Found presents four generations of women – Anastassiou’s infant daughter is also present in the film – circling around, approximating, interrupting, and reconfiguring the origin story of the family’s displacement. This grappling with the past is both an act of reciting (repeating from memory) and re-siting (resituating) of inherited narratives, the iterations of which constitute the shared vocabulary of a cross-generational language invested in the existentially important goal of mediating and preserving the family’s history. The film thus attempts to document the act of archiving; to mediate the act of mediation; but it does so in a way that openly resists the conventional archive’s aggressive demand for mystification and the often-unbearable weight it places on the shoulders of the postmemory generation.” (Argyro Nicolaou) 

Minevissam (I am writing) 

Niki Kohandel / 2023 / UK / 18’ / Digital / Farsi spoken, English subtitles 

In Minevissam (I am writing) Kohandel has created a collaged ode to the act of storytelling, be it through speech, song, text or image. Made in close collaboration with close friends and family members, the storytellers in the film – a poet, painter and owl – inspire a familiarity as they confide in us, even amidst the wonder that accompanies their alchemical acts. Central to the film is the materiality of these stories, their shapes, colours, letters and braille characters, with Kohandel painting, inscribing and punching braille directly onto the film stock. 

Followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers