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Darkroom Festival at Deptford Cinema presents a selection of experimental and documentary films and video art. The concept was originally conceived as a fringe event to the local contemporary art festival Deptford X. This year the festival will be online until we are able to reopen the venue as a pop-up.
AUSONIA (1946-1961)
Ausonia is a forgotten place, a part of Cagliari’s history of which no material evidence remains. The stories of the displaced people who inhabited it in the post-war period turn into visual suggestions, recalling the way in which memory gaps are naturally filled with fantasy, which mixes with reality. An experimental short film in which intimate dimension and collective past blend together in a dreamlike suspension. Ausonia is a travel across history and imagination.
Director - Giulia Camba, Elisa Meloni
Brithdir Mawr - Living Off Grid
Brithdir Mawr is an off grid, low impact eco community on an 80 acre farm in the Pembrokeshire coast National Park. It is a long standing, functioning community that over many years has demonstrated that living off the land is still do-able, low impact living is possible & co-operation works! This documentary is an insight into the lives of those at Brithdir Mawr and the benefits that sustainable living brings.
Director - Thomas Read
Images Of a Dream
Composed of videos published on YouTube by Petrobras outsourcers, the film explores an important brazilian chapter through fragments of working life inside and outside the factories. By their own hands, the working class records - over a decade (2008-2018) - the joys and disappointments of their journey.
Director - Leandro Olimpio
Lupines Will Abound
It’s not a matter of if a fire will affect you in Southern California, but when. This observational documentary film explores the shifting environmental impact on the iconic Southern California citrus orchard and farm in Ventura County. This film was made in collaboration with a teaching artist and lemon farmer, Ellen Birrell, who wrote the text for the piece. Her property survived a sudden conflagration that burnt most of the lemon farm in Santa Paula on the eve of Halloween 2019. The scorched landscape represents the exacerbating “new normals” of fire and drought, of global warming. Walking through a burn zone on the citrus farm one looks back and forward at a landscape entrenched in memory. The color of the earth is changing; there will be fire and lupines will abound.
Director - Cody Edison
Should Sex Still Sell?
An intimate and personal documentary, exploring the world of sex work (from workers and the law alike) and how decriminalisation can effect it’s future.
Director - Chantel Gregory
What does a farmer need to tell the world?
A look into the hectic life of a modern-day farmer in Maharashtra, India and where farming is headed in today’s ever-changing world. The struggles and joys of youth and the struggles and joys of being a veteran farmer leading a life that is anything but ordinary.
Director - Rhea Talati
Halal
Since the event of 9/11 in 2001, Islamophobia has spread all over the world, especially in the United States of America. Earlier last year, President Donald Trump also banned people from a number of Muslim countries from entering the USA, with an idea to eventually ban all Muslims from coming to the USA. As a Muslim student from Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world, I am amazed to encounter so many misconceptions of Islam and the concept of Halal in the United States. This short film shows about the lives of the Muslim population in Buffalo, USA, by exploring a simple question many non-Muslims have asked me: What is Halal?
Director - Azalia Muchransyah
Tommy or Johnny or Ronny
A hybrid documentary about the Vietnam War, my great uncle, and the absurdity of familial shame. Following the anecdotal stories my grandma told me about her brother during Vietnam, this documentary is an attempt at understanding what to do with those darker stories passed down through family.
Director - Maxfield Biggs
Rising Silence
If no one heeds your call, walk alone’ A journey of relationships between women, dealing with war, violence and daily prejudice to heal and create the future with unconditional love.
Director - Leesa Gazi
Feel India
An aerial journey through modern-day India
Director - Ion Sova