Hill Station
Edward Lawrenson | 2025 | UK | 29’ | digital | English spoken 

Hill Station takes as its point of departure an 1899 expedition by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine to research malaria prevention in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Among the expedition’s recommendations was to construct an exclusive enclave of “houses for Europeans” on a plateau above the city. This settlement – later known as Hill Station – was conceived as a spatial solution to disease, embedding health-based segregation into the urban fabric of colonial Freetown. Made in collaboration with architect and researcher Killian O’Dochartaigh, Lawrenson’s film traces the architectural, scientific, and political forces behind the construction of Hill Station and its afterlives. Drawing on archival materials and contributions from historian Professor Ibrahim Abdullah, the film moves between Freetown and Liverpool, exploring the intertwined histories of these port cities. 

Originally conceived as a two-channel installation and exhibited alongside an architectural model and related materials, the work examines how these elevated houses – still standing today – remain at once protective and exclusionary, inscribing structures of empire into the city itself.

A Person of the Forest
Miranda Pennell | 2026 | UK, The Netherlands | 33’ | digital | English spoken

“A dispatch from the back-room of a museum” (Miranda Pennell). 

In this ghostly tale, Pennell turns her forensic eye to the history of the Dutch “cultivation system” in Indonesia. “I am a ghost returned to tell the tale from the place where the end began”, says the narrator, a stand-in for the many primates violently extracted from their jungle habitats to be exhibited in museums and fairs in Europe. 

Whilst previous works engaged with photographic archives, primarily those documenting the legacies of the British imperial project, A person of the Forest points to the interconnectedness of European colonialism, making use of the collections of the EYE film museum in Amsterdam, the Naturalis Biodiversity Centre in Leiden and the Artis Zoological Museum in Amsterdam. 

Followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers.