PRO MME

Expand your festival experience with our film programme, exploring key themes and artists through a cinematic lens.

When There Is No More Music To Write, and other Roman Stories

by Eric Baudelaire

Eric Baudelaire’s triplet of short experimental films evokes the figure of avantgarde composer Alvin Curran, his relationship with Rome — where he settled in the mid-1960s — and the music he created there, mainly within the famous Musica Elettronica Viva collective. Instead of filming the renowned composer, Baudelaire draws upon his thoughts and sounds, creating a kaleidoscopic, intertextual approach to this artist’s work and legacy. Baudelaire also explores Curran’s creative process with collaborators, including his own companions, such as the underground filmmaker Annabella Miscuglio, of whom Baudelaire incorporates several films. Simultaneously, these films reflect on his city and his times, marked by the kidnapping of Aldo Moro and the revolutionary struggle — times which have heavily influenced Curran’s collaborative and performative processes. 59 min, 2022

Against Time

by Ben Russell

A tone-poem in blue and red by US artist and experimental filmmaker Ben Russel, Against Time is a visually staggering kind of cine diary, shot on various locations between 2019 and 2022. Trying to find a way through the fog of recent years, the piece plays with dissolving images, non-linear montage, modular synthesis, and a variety of looping techniques to reflect on how we experience time as a fragmented phenomenon. It results in hypnotic and beautiful experimental cinema that seems to mirror life in all of its interpersonal intricacies. 23 min, 2022

Anyox

by Jessica Johnson, Ryan Ermacora

A former mining town in remote northwest British Columbia, Anyox is now marked by mountainous slag piles accumulated as a byproduct of the early twentieth-century copper-smeling process. Anyox tracks the daily work of the town’s two sole residents, who organise and salvage value out of this seemingly endless mass of industrial waste. Concurrently, the film unfolds a complex labour history and reveals the vestiges of immense environmental degradation produced by the company-town model. Anyox explores a situated moment of labour press dissemination, activism, and the severe reaction from industry and government. This striking debut feature of Canadian directors Jessica Johnson and Ryan Ermacora, composed of 35mm and 65mm large-format cinematography, is imbued with a score by sound artist and composer Lea Bertucci. 87 min, 2022 and human reason can be removed from the centre of evolutionary processes. Passages from Rosny and interviews with Bjørnerud form the film’s science-fictional/science-factual spine, but stones are its anchor. To touch stone is to meet alien duration. We trust stone as archive, but we may as well write on water. In the end, it’s particles that remain.

50 min, 2023

Last Things

by Deborah Stratman

Evolution and extinction are approached from the point of view of rocks in this film by artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman — a humid take on minerals, where sci-fi meets sci-fact, with music from, amongst others, Thomas Ankersmit and Okkyung Lee. This project originated from two novellas of J.-H. Rosny, the joint pseudonym of the Belgian brothers Boex who wrote on natural, prehistoric, and speculative subjects — sci-fi before it was a genre. The film also draws upon a wide range of theory, critique, literature, and art to, in one way or another, reflect on how humankind

Handsworth Songs by Black Audio Film Collective

In October 1985 Britain witnessed a spate of civil disturbances in the Birmingham district of Handsworth and in urban centres of London. These were violent, tragic events, marked by the death of an elderly Black woman, Joy Gardner and a white policeman, Keith Blakelock. Handsworth Songs takes as its point of departure these events and the inability of the British media to go beyond its fixation on demonising or rationalising the rioters and their motives, to break the anxiety-driven loop of morbid responses to the presence of Black people in Britain. Evoking a broad range of voices, tones, and registers, Handsworth Songs approaches the riots and expresses its central idea: that it is not the riots in their dramatic unfolding, nor even in the wake of their violent eruption, which provide us with a route into the drama. Instead, the film contends that the meaning in the malaise is to be found in events outside the frame of contemporary reportage, in moments which seemed to have little affective relation to the expressions of discontent which characterised the riots — i.e., in the annals of post-war news reportage around race in Britain, which is transformed in the film into an archive of Black (un)belonging, or in the expression of hopes of belonging that were brutally deferred.

Handsworth Songs is presented as part of a focus programme on the work by sound composer and artist Trevor Mathison, who is part of the Black Audio Film Collective, a pioneering arts initiative founded in 1982 whose ground-breaking experimental works engaged with Black popular and political culture in Britain and Black and Asian diasporas.

59 min, 1986

Twilight City by

Black Audio Film Collective

A young woman, Octavia, receives a letter from her mother, who wants to return to London, after 10 years in Dominica, to live with her daughter again. The old resentments, hurt, and anger that Octavia thought had been buried by the past resurface. Paul Gilroy reminisces about his earliest memory of London. He was walking with his father through the Docklands — before its glossy redevelopment — looking at all of the old buildings, the strange symbols daubed on the walls, and wondered what the great fire of London did to the city. He asked his fa- ther many questions that he couldn’t answer. Gail Lewis grew up around Kilburn and Harrow. She remembers the neighbourhood as derelict. George Shires, another interviewee, talks about the images of London he grew up with at his school in Zimbabwe and how they didn’t align with his impression of London as a 12 year old immigrant: dark, dull, and restrictive, with a disorienting lack of smell. Twilight City is composed of many of these kinds of encounters and anecdotes, mapping out a different representation of life in England’s capital city.

Twilight City is presented as part of a focus programme on the work by sound composer and artist Trevor Mathison, who is part of the Black Audio Film Collective, a pioneering arts initiative founded in 1982 whose ground-breaking experimental works engaged with Black popular and political culture in Britain and lack and Asian diasporas.

52 min, 1989

Who Needs a Heart by Black Audio Film Collective

Who Needs A Heart is a parable of political becoming and subjective transformation and remains BAFC’s most controversial film. Akin to a sophisticated home-movie history, a record of life on the fringes in London between 1965 and 1975, the film explores the forgotten history of British Black Power through the fictional lives of a group of friends caught up in the metamorphoses of the movement’s central figure: the countercultural anti-hero, activist, and charismatic social bandit Michael Abdul Malik.

Dialogue is strictly a subsidiary element in Trevor Mathison’s allusive, inventive sound design; narrative emerges in snatches. Who Needs a Heart is a largely silent film whose soundtrack of Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Albert Ayler, Anthony Braxton, John Coltrane, and the ritual music of the Llamas and Tibetan Monks of the Four Great Orders investigates the expressionist potential of music to create the conditions for the movement of images.

Who Needs a Heart is presented as part of a focus programme on the work by sound composer and artist Trevor Mathison, who is part of the Black Audio Film Collective, a pioneering arts initiative founded in 1982 whose ground-breaking experimental works engaged with Black popular and political culture in Britain and Black and Asian diasporas.

78 min, 1991

The Last Angel of History

by John Akomfrah

The Last Angel of History is one of the most influential video-essays of the 1990s, influencing filmmakers and inspiring conferences, novels, and exhibitions. BAFC’s exploration of the chromatic possibilities of digital video is embedded within a mythology of the future that creates connections between Black non-popular culture, outer space, and the limits of the human condition. This cinematic essay posits science fiction — with tropes such as alien abduction, estrangement, and genetic engineering — as a metaphor for the Pan-African experience of forced displacement, cultural alienation, and otherness. Included are interviews with Black cultural figures, from musicians DJ Spooky, Goldie, and Derek May, who discuss the importance of George Clinton to their own music, to George Clinton himself. In keeping with the futuristic tenor of the film, the interviews are intercut with images of Pan-African life from different periods of history, jumping between time and space from the past to the future to the present, not unlike the visual mode of many rock videos of the film’s time.

The Last Angel of History is presented as part of a focus programme on the work by sound composer and artist Trevor Mathison, who is part of the Black Audio Film Collective, a pioneering arts initiative founded in 1982 whose ground-breaking experimental works engaged with Black popular and political culture in Britain and the Black and Asian diasporas.

46 min, 1995

Atlantic Ragagar

by Gilles Aubry

The Sidi Bouzid beach near the Moroccan port city of El Jadida is famed for its crystal- clear sea and extraordinary biodiversity — there are dozens of species of algae. However, some of them are used by pharmaceutical and food companies to produce agar powder. The nearby factories producing canned fish and phosphate fertilisers pollute the water and air. This documentary by Swiss sound artist, musician, and researcher Gilles Aubry uses performative interventions which erase the distinction between the human and the natural to explore the multilayered relationship of the locals to the ecosystem which is a source of both awe and their livelihood. 32 min, 2022 of Eliane Radigue’s compositions are a recurring motif, alongside music composed by Erkizia himself. 63 min, 2021

O Gemer

by Xabier Erkizia

O Gemer is an experimental film on the geographic and historical voyage of the peculiar sound of the so-called “Basque ox carts.” This sound, which could be heard in part of the Bay of Biscay until the 1960s, has now practically disappeared from the Iberian peninsula. This film by Spanish musician, sound artist, producer, and journalist Xabier Erkizia travels from the silence of the sound in our territory today, until its reappearance, following years of research, in the central area of Brazil. This particular screeching sound — albeit in tune — made by the cart when moving forward, questions our senses and our experience of what the world that we see sounds like. On the soundtrack, Julia Eckhardt’s interpretation