Event Schedule
1pm – 2pm: Screening Part 1
Lauren Heckler and Shanzay Subzwari, Sister Sing a Song (there’s a shallow answer and then there’s the deeper answer) (2025), 16min27
A short film shaped by the physical and virtual travel between the artists’ countries.
A shared melody sung as a nursery rhyme in the UK and a Christian tribute in a Pakistani Convent School are sung together. In a hybrid watch party, the Pakistani film Jinnah (1998) is beamed to Shanzay in Karachi from Lauren’s living room in London, after the two were unable to source the film in Pakistan. Scans of passport visas and colonial relics interject. Costumed in matching blouses and dresses sourced in Carmarthen (Wales), and waistcoats (vascuts) from Hunza, apples are used as symbolic props to reflect on stories of origin, cultural bridging, and ideas of journeying, connection, play, beauty, life, death and power.
The chapters layer into one another to ask: can histories be absorbed in ways that foster empathy and an understanding of nuance? Can tenderness transcend borders and be carried forward?
Umi Ishihara, Thundergod (2024), 18min
Thundergod is a narrative experimental film that explores the motif of lightning as a random chance encounter. It examines histories of mythology, religion, resilience and acceptance. The film is set in a small, imaginary mountain village in Japan, known for its frequent lightning strikes. It tells the story of an underground club that only those who have survived lightning strikes are invited to perform in. The characters in the film are drawn into continuous conflict with the animal world as they encounter many crabs throughout, becoming a metaphor for both desire and danger.
Karen Russo, Sinkholes (2024), 18min40
Taking its starting point the rapid drying of the Dead Sea, Sinkholes is a dystopian vision of a world in which water has become scarce. Following the voiceover of its protagonist, Lawrence, the story unfolds through documentary scenes shot in Israel and Palestine. While the sites are real, the narration transforms these into the ruins of a society, doomed to a world in which it has ceased to rain. Following Lawrence in his journey to find water inland, Sinkholes imagines a moment in which time has come to a standstill, where technology and society has devolved to simpler forms and the planet has regressed to inorganic processes. Threading together references to a history of artists fascinated by entropy and the post-human Sinkholes is a mediation on our desire for survival and resignation in the face of the possibility of extinction.
2pm – 2:30pm – INTERVAL
2:30pm – 4pm: Screening Part 2
Simon Rattigan, RiverView (2024), 12min44
A river divides territory and is at once a way in and a way out, where tidal shifts push and pull one’s desires to go and explore the beyond, while old loyalties hold onto the past weighing down one’s need to escape.
The Thamesmead estate in Southeast London was built in 1968 in brutalist concrete architecture and placed at the margins of the city. Named after the river, proclaiming its connection to the heart of the metropolitan centre and out to the rest of the world.
Shot in 16mm, black and white film, echoing artist John Latham’s work Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1971, utilizing in-camera split screen and double exposure to explore ideas of psychogeography and synchronicity.
Fanxi Sun, I kept following until I realized what was true (2025), 3min47
A film about walking, moving, traveling, and migrating; about the choreography of camerawork and the art of editing; about playing with sound and images; about making a statement. It also serves as Sun’s farewell to the city of Richmond, Virginia, USA, where she lived for three years until the summer of 2024.
Dorothy Cheung, as a bird that briefly perches (2025), 16min52
Departing from Cheung’s personal experience as a diasporic artist, this three-part video work is a cinematic diary that weaves together her sentiments about homeland with reference to the geology of Hong Kong; an analogy between human nature and greenhouse gardening; and her reflections on the choice of living abroad as she studies the everyday life of migrant farmers and their adaptation on foreign soil, reinterpreting agricultural processes and the migration of species. The work explores the implications of rooting, re-rooting and growing as the artist contemplates on the evolving dynamics between land and human.
