Close Up

22 November 2018: November Film Festival Programme 1

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Graeme Arnfield and Christina Chalmers will be present for Q&A, with G. Anthony Svatek on Skype.

Flores
Jorge Jacome
2017 | 26 min | Colour | Digital
London premiere 

In a natural crisis scenario, the entire population of Azores is forced to evict due to an uncontrolled plague of hydrangeas, a common flower in these islands.Two young soldiers, bound to the beauty of the landscape, guide us to the stories of sadness of those forced to leave and the inherent desire to resist by inhabiting the islands. The filmic wandering becomes a nostalgic and political reflection on territorial belonging and identity, and the roles we assume in the places we came from.

Shouting at the Ground
Graeme Arnfield
2017 | 17 min | Colour | Digital
UK festival premiere 

In a peat bog in North West England a Spanish woman was murdered, her body buried and subsumed into the treacherously dense ecological matter. Taking the real life disappearance of Malika Maria De Fernandez along with the global trade of fossil fuels as an poignant opening, Shouting at the Ground is an agricultural & archaeological murder mystery circling around a void, oscillating it’s images and sounds between states of violent networked embodiment and pitch black absence, of burial and exhumation.

Notes on Capture
Christina Chalmers
2018 | 6 min | Colour | Digital
World premiere

Archival footage of the people of the islands of St. Kilda some time prior to their evacuation in 1930’s prompts this personal meditation on the enduring anguish of geo-cultural fatalities. In some of the most remote and isolated islands in the north west of Scotland, we witness the ethnographic gaze of mainlanders variously rejected, resisted, and refused by an assembly of female islanders. Linking personal anecdote to the ethical dilemmas of the historical record of the Other inside, Notes on Capture interrogates how one finds roots from a history which can only appear with downcast eyes.

.TV
G. Anthony Svatek
2017 | 22 min | Colour | Digital
English & Tuvalu with English subtitles
UK premiere

.TV is a found footage essay film: Voicemails left by an anonymous caller from the future guide us to the remote islands of Tuvalu, which the global media has described as “the first country to disappear due to rising sea levels”. Surrounded by thousands of miles of open water, much of Tuvalu’s revenue comes from its country-code web extension .TV, a popular domain choice among global video-streaming and television industries. The caller describes how heat, digital screens, and distance gave him no choice but to leave his sinking home and escape into cyberspace where rising waters will never reach him.

Total runtime: 71 min

Part of November Film Festival