Ipsa (I watched the Moon around the House)

Blanca García | 2023 | Spain | 15’ | Super 8 | silent

A dreamy, textural self-portrait, shot and projected on Super 8, which dialogues with Emily Dickinson’s poetry (“I watched the Moon around the House / Until upon a Pane / She stopped / a Traveller’s privilege / for Rest”). “A film about the mutable self, recognised only as reflection, as a glimpse — like the moon, like film itself — a fantasy perceived only if traversed by light and shadow, and yet never fully apprehended but as an instant, fleeting” (Blanca García).

To Brasil

Ute Aurand | 2023 | Germany | 19’ | 16mm | sound

A filmic encounter with Brazil, which Aurand visited for the first time in September 2022 for screenings of her films and Margaret Tait’s in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Aurand’s 16mm films are portraits of people and place, often prompted by the discovery and experience of travel. As George Clark has written, the journey is a cornerstone of Aurand’s filmmaking: “Her work builds out from fragments, detours, refrains and returns; her camera picks up discarded gestures and suspends them in time. Films are always moving, always fleeting, Aurand’s work reminds us. These qualities are as fundamental to lived experience as they are to the cinema. Throughout Ute Aurand’s work we encounter a world animated by her mobile and dynamic camera, following, chasing, leading and dissecting space.”  

The Red Tide 

Sally Lawton | 2022 | USA | 8’ | digital | English spoken 

A move to the Florida coast prompts Lawton to reflect on the people that have shaped her relationship to the area, from her family to the artists Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt, whose land works have left permanent traces on this landscape. The film is a documentation of these personal histories of the site, through reconstruction, stream-of-consciousness voiceover and family footage but it also cannot escape the growing ecological threats that the area faces in the present, one of which, a harmful algal bloom that turns the seawater red, provides the film’s title. Lawton’s anxious investigation into the acquisition and preservation of legacies, art historical or personal, asks what purpose they may serve in a future that grows ever more uncertain. 

The Wool Aliens

Julia Parks | 2023 | UK | 28’ | digital | English spoken

In the early 20th century, a botanist named Ida Hayward discovered more than 300 plant species native to Australia, New Zealand, North America, and Africa growing on the banks of the River Tweed in Scotland. Hayward found that the wool industry was moving plants around the globe. The plants along the Tweed had grown from seeds that had been washed from the local woollen mills as part of the region’s world-famous textile industry. The Wool Aliens is a layered cinematic study of the region along the Teviot and Tweed Rivers in Scotland that originated in a residency project hosted by Alchemy Film & Arts between April and October 2022. Working with 16mm, Parks emphasises the tactile entanglement between the wool industry, the local flora, migration and the colonial project.

With the support of the Goethe-Institut London.
Followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers hosted by Martin Grennberger.