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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.
The Music Machine
The Music Machine is about a young woman stuck in a psychiatric hospital. She can no longer distinguish between reality and imagination. She is living in a nightmare, has lost herself and thus the motivation to live.
Director Biography - Frida Feline Nilsen
I have chosen music and film as my way of expression because I feel this is the best platform to process emotions as well as shedding light on important themes.
La Citta Reale
La Città Reale is an experimental narrative using puppetry and moving cardboard insects. The hand of the puppeteer performer becomes a form of moving city, where individuals and communities are isolated but always interconnected.The film is a testament to vulnerability and resilience in contemporary times.
Director - Hing Tsang
picture box
This experimental digital video originates from a walk with the artist’s mother whose life has changed since the onset of Parkinson’s disease. picture box is an attempt to encounter some of the physical and emotional dynamics of human experience and to explore the ways in which one might try to locate oneself in relation to such a paradoxical ‘space in-between’.
Director - janice howard
Salon Gloria
A consumerist love story between japanese puppet theatre and the world of advertisement
Director Biography - Fabio Thieme
Studied and Lived in London, Berlin and Rome. Founder of berlin-based Serkalo Filmproduktion
Digits of Pi
Pi meets Duchamp in a transcendental film!Inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s “Anemic Cinema,” I set out to create a film composed within a circular frame. This circular composition led directly to using the number pi for the underlying structure. Having the digits of pi sung on the soundtrack is an homage to “Einstein on the Beach” by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson.
Director - Tom Bessoir, Joshua Pines
compulsory heterosexuality
how can we queer a body in solitude?
Inspired by Adrienne Rich’s essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”.
Director - Emily M Van Loan
Video Art for Insomniacs
I wanted to use video art to guide people suffering with sleeplessness to an anxiety free night. The film is about not forcing yourself to sleep which never works anyway. I also visually represent the idea of soul fragmentation with two circles as insomnia can often be caused by a ‘tug of war’ between two parts of yourself wanting different things. The coming together of the circles represents me acknowledging each part of my mind’s desires. It ends with a spiritual dream space in-between sleep and awake where I finally drift off.
Director - Henny Woods
I am in my final year at Ravensbourne University studying Digital Film Production. I have always been interested specifically in Video art and experimental cinema. I made this video in relation to my dissertation about audience engagement within video art.
Herbarium No.2
This video is a collaborative self-portrait. It makes the connection between our bodies and flora as fragile things, to be preserved for viewing. The footage was run through a random frame selection code, juxtaposing the two forms and then edited it an a way that speaks to collection and documentation; the process one goes through when making a herbarium.
Director - Tia Bennett
Miracle
Jay, Maine (USA), April 15, 2020. This is a true story.
Director - Neil Ira Needleman
Orange
An autobiographical examination of the experience of loss through the landscape of a dream. Memory and the subconscious find new visual forms in this exploration of real and imagined relationships.
Director Biography - Ingrid Stobbe
Ingrid is a an award-winning Visual Media Artist and the Visiting Professor of Visual and Sound Media at Seton Hall University. She creates a diverse range of work including both narrative and experimental pieces that address the material as a physical, tangible element first and most importantly. Subsequent choices incorporate and combine different media elements and genres while maintaining the unique properties of the included mediums, commenting on form and its relationship to viewer identity.
LET RIP: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF SEEING AND NOT SEEING
As a teenager, you do not really know who you are. This film is a self-reflection - a ‘this is what it was like’ to come to terms with my homosexuality; of me finding somebody attractive (men) but not really knowing what I am. Some ‘rips’ reveal imagery and text quickly whilst others are slow - how things come to you over time. It is an excess of snippets from my life and moments of recognition pertaining to the desire to be seen but not wanting to be seen at the same time.
Director - Lee Campbell
Cell Scope
This is a white screen.
The projector turns the color wheel to release the color.
Depending on the shutter speed, a white-hidden spectrum is exposed on the screen.
Like Shepherd’s notes, which rise endlessly, the white screen continues to rise.
The color wheel keeps spinning and the screen is still in front of us.
Director - HeeSueKwon
Do You Love Me?
Unlike anything you’ll see again. DYLM is an enigma of emotion portraying the effects of love, betrayal, revenge, and rebirth. DYLM is an ART EXPERIENCE that refuses to follow any rules. We don’t ask that you understand it, let it understand you.
Director Biography - Maison Kwame, KC SImms
Maison Kwame & KC Simms have been developing their unique psychedelic style for years now. Each and every project is about creating something that did not exist before they laid their hands on it. This duo is all about innovation and bringing a breath of fresh air to the filmmaking world.
KLAÜD
The stigma of your absence covers my skin…
What if this life of memories was just a strange and astounding carnival?
Director - Aurélia Mengin
Reckless
Reckless is a hybrid dance film which is one part of a conceptual art project about the experiences of mental being; each one portraying a different struggle such as, Borderline, Depression & Anxiety. Various styles of physical performance function as a search for something more profound in the endangered and fragile feeling of our environment. The narrative portrays the protagonist (Leo Luchini) wandering on a late night and falling into a back-and-forth with an obscure force, while being misguided by his own mind and its’ urges. Dealing with borderline is about ones constant involvement with the own inner personas.
Director - Konstantina Levi
Freytag’s Pyramid of Climactic Light
Freytag’s Pyramid of Climactic Light interrogates the relationship between the individual film frame and the audience’s perception of the ideology projected. By taking 16mm film and capturing 900 different stills from NC-17 rated films through a 35mm photo camera and projecting the images at the standard cinematic frame rate of 24 frames per second, I ask the audience to investigate the relationship between each frame.
Director Biography - Kai Swanson
Kai Swanson is a screenwriter, filmmaker, performer, performance artist, installation artist, and digital/analog photographer. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Film & Video Production at The University of Iowa. Her moving image work spans across several genres, including: narrative shorts, web series, essay, first-person documentary, recorded performance pieces, and experimental shorts.
KINDLE - a time capsule for my death told in three parts
“And he dreamed that he was in a cold, high place, like a mountain. He was high, so high that he walked in mist and cloud, but before him stretched the blank ascent, the steep side of the mountain. A voice said: ‘Come higher.’ And he began to climb. After a little, clinging to the rock, he found himself with only clouds above him and mist below-and he knew that beyond the wall of mist reigned fire.” - James Baldwin’s Go Tell it to the Mountain
Director - martin del carpio
Reditus Domum
An intergalactic entity is called home to be with his family.
Director - Andrew Huggins
Once Upon Another
‘Once Upon Another’ is a visual narrative that challenges the notion of traditional sculpture and its relationship with surrounding spaces. It’s inspired by a quote by the Japanese-American artist and designer Isamu Noguchi: "Everything is sculpture. Any material, any idea without hindrance born into space, I consider sculpture.“ It consists of a series of vignettes of installations (or in this case sculptures) that live in grand architectural landscapes, seen through a CG lens.
Director Biography - Chuck George Tsioutsias
Chuck George is a director, art director and CG artist. After receiving an honours degree in Communication Design from Chelsea College of Arts & Design along with yet another honours in 3D Animation & Visual Effects from Vancouver Film School, he spent years creating for the likes of Vivienne Westwood, Selfridges, SHOWstudio, Hussein Chalayan, David LaChapelle, Hugo Boss, Nokia, Bose, Microsoft, SXSW, Skin, Breach, Sean Paul etc
Since then his films have been shown in Cannes, at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Barbican in London and have been featured in publications like Stash, Creative Review and IdN to name but a few. He set up big-boy.studio, a creative practice for stills, motion and film and lives between London, UK and Vancouver, BC
HOOL
The inspiration for this film was a long-abandoned hacienda, Hool, in Merida, Mexico – its striking architectural features, the haunting atmosphere of weathered chambers, its slow return to nature’s domain, the impression of time suspended.
In the span of a single day, from sunrise to sunset, Mexican architect-filmmaker Isaac Zambra and cameraman Mario Morales Rubí followed dancers Kirstie Simson (UK) and Martin Piliponsky (Argentina) as they moved through different spaces in the hacienda compound. The imprint of the histories contained within its walls shaped the dancers’ improvisations. Ghosts of past, present, and future are listened to—and live again—through the dancers’ embodied expression, honoring the mysteries of life.
Director - Isaac Zambra
The Library
‘The Library’ is an experimental documentary to convey the sentiment of the Library from the viewpoints from a student. We all know the library has been always known as the place for helping students, but no one teaches us the dystopian side of the library in relation to the machinery. From the four-year experience of one library, I visually cartographed the library by focusing the stuff which are always-be-there but no one interested in.
Director Biography - Sohee Kim
Huo Zhe
Hands are us, water is how the life treating us, and we as audiences are watching the life from far. The title “Huo Zhe” means “living” in Mandarin.
Director - Kino Lee
Kino Lee is a pianist, violinist, composer and arranger who hails from Taipei, Taiwan. Lee earned a degree in Classical Piano Performance from Fujen University in the Spring of 2017, she graduated from Berklee College of Music in Film Scoring with a minor in Video Game Scoring. From 2017-2019, Lee has been living and working in NYC to accomplish her career as a musician and a film composer.
Echoing in Green
Two women who are somehow connected to each other. Two abstract yet distinct storylines intersect through time and space where the line between dreams and reality, memories and fantasies is bent.
Director - Sara Vermelhudo
I am still here
In eleven static long takes, this is the story of a man who refuses to adapt to the digital revolution withdrawing into the ruins of a movie theater. Humanity has found a way todematerialize itself believing this is a way to escape from time and death. The nostalgic protagonist, however, does not accept the present. He decides to retain his own body, relegating himself to a life of solitude. Living in that place, the man struggles to remember a world that is about to end. Ruins, as well as the building site, are interior landscapes. Ruins are the sign of the slowness of time. The building site is a place of expectation where the presence of a lost past and the uncertainty of what can happen occurs. In the movie, the super 8 film and the story told are merged into a single identity, both trying to assert their presence and trying to prolong their own existence.
Director - Gianluca Salluzzo
Led3Times
A sci-fi fashion show. A robotic catwalk. Dance at the speed of light.
Director Biography - Alessandro Amaducci
Born in Torino (Italy) in 1967. He worked with the Archimedes Centre of Visual Arts (a cultural centre of a District in Torino), were he held workshops on video, with the National Film Archives of Resistence (Torino), where he realized documentaries about the Second World War, the Resistance, about workers struggle and other subjects relevant to the activity of the Archive, and with Theater Juvarra in Torino in the realization of multimedia shows and video performances. He is also professor of video language and practice in DAMS, University of Torino. He wrote several books about videoart; video technics and aesthetics of electronic arts. Since 1989 he realizes experimental videos, music videos, video installations, multimedia shows, video scenographies for dance performances and digital photographies.
Eggg
Eggg is a fast-paced visual essay shedding light onto what it is that drives us all. The film examines us as the collective mystery with the steadfast common goal: to get bigger.
Director - Daniel Hishikawa
Plus One
We see some mimics from Fuat’s face. It is not understandable at first sight, but then at the end we understand who he is and it triggers our mind to think it over again, what is normal what is not
Director - Abdullah Şahin
THE QUIET
When an astronaut ponders on the quietude of space, he comes upon a startling self-realisation.
Director Biography - Radheya Jegatheva
Radheya Jegatheva is a Perth based Australian filmmaker born in Johor, Malaysia to parents of South Korean, Japanese, Indian and Malaysian ancestry. He is a Bachelor of Commerce and Arts student at Curtin University in Western Australia. Radheya’s films have been selected to 16 Academy Award Qualifying Festivals along with an nomination for the Australian Academy of Cinema & TV Arts (AACTA) Award, often described as Australia’s equivalent to the Oscars.
Radheya’s films which collectively have more than 900 official selections and 340 awards worldwide have been played in all the worlds 7 continents with the most difficult bastion breached when “iRony” played at Antarctica’s Davis Research Station.
Succubi
Succubi is a short poetic movie with experimental free-style dance. I recorded myself doing improvised choreography on the terrace of the seaside house, late at night, while everyone was asleep. The setting was quiet, only song of crickets lacing the silence of the air. I represent a ghost, a phantom-like apparition, surreal creature that is succubus, female who haunts and attacks men in their sleep. Or it could be a dream sequence per se, where I invocate strange, otherwordly forces and act out my inner energy and psychological impulses. It is a seduction in the heat of the night, but paradoxically cool, aloof and distant. I wanted to paint poetic image, and my breathing is essential part of it.
Director - Petra Brnardic
The Imaginary Texture of the Real
“The Imaginary Texture of The Real” is an experimental video art based on the work of María Sarah Del Piano. Through archive images, photographs and the history of an artist’s diving experience, this video immerses us in a visual and sound experience towards the ocean floor and towards Sarah’s work.
Director - Natalia Zambaglioni
lot
Animated by hand, ‘lot’ is an experimental film made with water & glass.
Director - Marcus Kliewer
Next Premise
Questioning the future of humanity, Next Premise was composed entirely from other filmmakers’ unused footage, sound and trash files.
Director - Alexis Bass
Labrador
Tells the never ending cycle of Filipino Farmers, they struggle to achieve equal labor rights and land rights.
Director - Jay Francis G. Letrillard
“inside the pipelines”
“inside the pipelines” is an experimental documentary film that combines video and animation.The film documents wandering around the Central Bus Station. The film deals with loneliness, fear, identity, strangeness and affection.
Director - Adva Santo
No land to live
It could be 1 single-channel or 55 single-channel，depand on for screening.
55single-channel video clips are being used in this work.
I set them in a huge factory space with different size of the screen to play and they all making sounds.
You could also hear the resonance surrounded in such a space.
It’s about the silent screaming for what’s happening in Taiwan. You could see a teen wander on the street in the late night. He would rather than going somewhere else or heading a destination. It’s like we just left a party or a gathering even depart from a formal occasion. He’s heading somewhere else but he just stood there and not welling to leave at this point.
Director Statement - Tseng Yu Chin
Each person is an individual sensory being. From the environment, sensory information enters the body, creating a feedback that manifests in the individual’s body language and facial expression.
The individual’s resistance against collective homogenization is where one experiences existence in its philosophical sense, the reaction of the “I” carving on the body. Truth is oftentimes unrelated to what is documented, but found in the traces left on the body that is the witness of one’s existence.
My work points out that the bilateral gaze between society and the self is akin to the back-and-forth of philosophical debates. It also questions the concept of painterliness and de-aestheticization in the contemporary image. My work oftentimes resemble that of a theatrical setting, sometimes it is a documentary paraphrase (as opposed to metaphrase) of everyday-life events. It uses video, installation, or photography to represent a slice of an event, a slice of everyday life, or even a slice of a body. One could interpret the work as the cross-section of a certain texture, which is part of the process of combing through its totality.