Director
Based on documents found in Berlin archives, Four Parts of a Folding Screen explores exclusion, statelessness and the legalised theft and sale of everyday family possessions by the National Socialist regime. A voice, enigmatic and sometimes uncertain, foretells of, relates and recalls the routine processes of injustice and their legacy: the creation of a diaspora of household objects, scattered amongst buildings that no longer exist. As the camera probes the secrets of ordinary spaces, streets and buildings around the city of Berlin, semblances of a person and a history begin to emerge and coalesce.
Director
Based in part on the memories, unsent letters and notebooks of a young photographer who lived in Berlin-Tempelhof. Aspects of her life are mapped out within this small area of Berlin through a succession of haunted images and sounds that imbue place with a sense of memory and history.
Stephen Dwoskin’s final film is a meditation on the subjective experience and cultural concepts of ageing. The film is an ode to the texture, the beauty, the singularity of aging faces and silhouettes, a hypnotic poem in the Dwoskin meaning of the term which is long observations of very tiny details. A gesture, a pause, a look, a moment. Throughout his films intimacy has always played a leading role and this is also true for Age is..., all the faces being close friends, or close friends relatives and sometimes even Stephen himself.
Director
An essay film occupying the ground between narrative, documentary and experimental film-making. It is a work of fragmented histories: of the catastrophes of empire, war, terror and resistance of our times. Its unseen narrator 'encounters' the inhabitants of an undisclosed port city in old Europe as they stroll along a jetty in the melancholy fading light of evening. These meetings are with terrorists, philosophers, writers, photographers, shopkeepers whose subjective accounts and conjecture create a rupture within twentieth century history and beyond.
Director
A small, personal and moving documentary about the father of the film maker. The title refers to a statement by her father: 'My bag has a thousand pockets. In each is a memory'. Old Mr Kennedy has a lot to remember (he lived through both world wars and was driven from Germany by the persecution of the Jews), but tragically enough, his memory is increasingly failing him.
Director
Elegy is a film about and in memory of a cat. It depicts her nocturnal space as imagined by us. It occurs partly in our ‘garden’, a dank and decaying back yard full of weeds and wildlife, a place that belonged more to her than to us. Various creatures join in the process of mourning, on and off screen.
Editor
The film is just this kind wandering through the personal ways and whys of different kinds of pain in different kinds of people. The film searches through the many levels of pain and finds it in its unique position between disaster and pleasure. Pain is..thus plunges us instantly into the midst of controversy and the unknown.
"Either in its natural state or with its embellishments of makeup, jewels, and hairdos, nothing can restrain the imagination from the most forms of speculation. All the senses are concentrated in this one head: eyes, ears, nose, lips, tongue and the skin which covers all with its network of vibrating nerves. One imagines the senses, the counterpart of our own, ready to respond with all the various moods, suggestions and agreements. Through the eyes alone, when placed in contact with our own, a visual dialogue and interplay is embarked upon. And when the lips, two bodies fitting together in perfect harmony, break into a smile, they invite further exploration. Then, with the engagement of time, this dialogue shifts from speculation to realization. The face transforms from its abstract suggestiveness to the singular projection of seduction. It is no longer anyones face; it is the face of one particular person" (Stephen Dwoskin)
Editor
A rich and challenging account of the experiences of a German Jewish musician who settled in Britain to escape Nazi persecution. Two of his friends are being sued by a former SS Kommandant, who denies their accusation that he was responsible for the genocide of 300 Belgians. Documentary interviews and archive footage merge with dramatised scenes to create a new way of representing history and memory.
Director
A rich and challenging account of the experiences of a German Jewish musician who settled in Britain to escape Nazi persecution. Two of his friends are being sued by a former SS Kommandant, who denies their accusation that he was responsible for the genocide of 300 Belgians. Documentary interviews and archive footage merge with dramatised scenes to create a new way of representing history and memory.
Director
Face of an Angel is inspired by Puccini’s opera La Fanciulla del West, set during the Californian gold rush. The film is shot is the scarred black landscape of an open cast mine in South Wales, one of the original coal mining areas which fuelled the industrial revolution in Britain. Taking the theme of redemption, the film depicts choreographed yellow dumper trucks, portraits of miners and an escape to another life using the painterly surface of low format video. Fragments of music from the opera are woven into an industrial sound track.
