2/16 Cristina Nuñez, Someone to Love. Someone To Love' collates 25 years of self-portraits - a process of documentation which Nuñez initiated in order to overcome a period of drug addiction and insecurity as a young person. Nuñez shows a constant pursuit of her own roots and identity through faces and bodies. She demonstrates a vulnerability and plasticity which invites our own introspectivity.
3/16 Billy Sassi, The Battle from Outer Space. 'The Battle...' reflects the uncomfortable experiences of 'Lockdown' in terms of the imposed constraints, but also the potential resulting from the expanse of time. The film embodies the discomfort of facing the uncertainty of ‘purpose’ in a space of alienation, where two spacemen are stranded on a distant planet while a war rages back at home.
4/16 David Cotterrell, Transmission. 'Transmission' is a meeting between two strangers in a real or imagined future – where the human race or human contact may well be a thing of the past. The short film follows a solitary man’s occupation of an ambiguous space as he tries to engage beyond his own world, seeks for a romantic connection and begins to fear what he might find if he is successful.
6/16 Francis and Anthony Almendárez, Navigating the Archives Within. 'Navigating the Archives Within', a film by brothers Francis and Anthony Almendárez. Navigating the Archives Within questions how histories, cultural traditions, and personal experiences are kept and transmitted. The video captures an auto-ethnographic journey through Latinx misrepresentation, erasure, subordination, and subversion.
7/16 Zain Al Sharaf Wahbeh, Traversing the Reimagined Palestinian Neighbourhood. Zain's film demonstrates the environmental changes of her home country from a local perspective. It acts as a form of cultural restoration in the face of catastrophe, destruction and pain. Zain collates information from archival sources, she then illustrates and uses a rendering software to create a seamless animated film.
8/16 Carla Geronimi, Ladon. ‘Ladon’ is based on mythology, it evokes a dreamscape which immerses but also maintains suspense. Carla explores dreams, memory and identity with the ambiguity of non-linear narratives that often bleed into the absurd. Ethereal imagery and sound-scaping are tools used to build a sensory experience – the film becomes an environment as it envelops and completely involves the viewer.
10/16 Keith Piper, A Ship Called Jesus (Redux). Piper's film leads us along a discussion of the relationship between peoples of African descent and the Christian church which is laced with complexity and contradiction. The history of the points of overlap between the aesthetics and rhetoric of the church, and the temporal and commercial needs of the English State, has left us with an especially poignant image. It is an image that dates back to the very inception of English involvement in the Atlantic slave trade.
11/16 Joyce Treasure, Welcome to England. ‘Welcome to England' centres on an intergenerational project with older African and Caribbean people from the Pepper Pot Day Centre under the Westway, W10. The film focuses on the older people's experiences of moving to England, and helping to shape their communities. The film is warmly enticing, with a colloquial set-up that highlights the intricacies of the stories told by the film's subject.
12/16 Helen Cammock, There's a Hole in the Sky. The film uses photography and documentary film methods to explore the intimate bonds of history, often of colonialism, racism and cultural appropriation. Cammock explains how the slave trade was created to support sugar production in the Caribbean – and introduces first-person accounts of the disjointed experience of those ‘subjects’ who moved from the West Indies to the UK.
14/16 Yamile Calderon, Domestic at Large. Calderon's film approaches the drug trafficking problem in Colombia from a grounded, personal, and domestic perspective. The project is deeply connected to Calderon's experience of growing up in Colombia when the era of narcotraffic dealing was at its prime. The images that feature in the film are taken by Calderon herself - they frame the still scenes of mafia properties that have since been seized by the government.
15/16 Jesse Roth, Escape Artist: The Highs and Lows of Chris Dobrowolski. The film explores Chris Dobrowolski's playful, on purpose aesthetically rough, yet deeply poetic work. With a DIY aesthetics, Chris mixes real and unreal and creates Kafkaesque imaginaries and paradoxes that reinterpret with unpolished romanticism history, ideologies, capitalism, and daily life.
16/16 Blue-Ren Marcus, Nu-Vu. This film pokes at the holes of a stagnant and objective reality, framed within the context of the strange hyperbole that is America. Through the subversion of the archetypal American road trip film, this work reveals an existential quality. Highlighted by the character’s perpetual motion, the film is a futile quest for meaning and substance. 'Nu-Vu' is filmed with a meditative stillness and has a pensive and provoking narration throughout.
Deptford Film Club is a four-part monthly event organised by @empathyandrisk and @lookingforward_london in partnership. The film club consisted of four instalments of featuring videos by various artists.
Credits
Event supported by SHAPESLewisham, Lewisham’s Creative Enterprise Zone and Sheffield Hallam University.
