THE NINE MUSES

John Akomfrah, co-founder of the Black Audio Film Collective, expands his exhibition Mnemosyne beyond the gallery in this visual-poem telling the story of Britain’s post-war migrations.

Divided into nine musical chapters and mixing a vast array of archival material, THE NINE MUSES reforges The Odyssey as a reflection upon journeys, migration, memory and the power of elegy.
Using spectacular landscape imagery from Alaska with rare archive footage from the BBC, Akomfrah sets the writings of Dante, Beckett and Basho to an equally wide-ranging musical selection with readings from Richard Burton, John Barrymore and Michael Sheen. An utterly absorbing meditation on a journey towards self-discovery, a sorrow song on a quest for knowledge and identity.

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TWO YEARS AT SEA

A man called Jake lives alone in a ramshackle house in the middle of the forest. He goes for walks whatever the weather and takes naps in the misty fields and woods. He builds a raft to spend time fishing in a loch and drives a beat-up old jeep to pick up supplies of wood. Seen across the seasons surviving frugally and passing the time with strange projects, he is living the radical dream he had as a younger man, a dream he spent two years working at sea to realise.

Winner of a FIPRESCI Prize at the 2011 Venice Film Festival, Ben Rivers’ debut feature-length work, shot on 16mm film, extends his relationship with Jake, first encountered in his short THIS IS MY LAND. The film has at its core the relationship between a person and the place they have chosen to live out their life and the deep connection there is between them.

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THIS OUR STILL LIFE + EDEN + Q&A

Premiered at this year’s Venice Film Festival, the latest from Andrew Kötting (GALLIVANT, IVUL) is a deliciously eccentric portrait of the remote tumbledown Pyrenean farmhouse where the film-maker, his wife Leila and daughter Eden have lived on and off for more than 20 years. Last seen in GALLIVANT as a plucky kid touring the coastline of Britain, Eden, who was born with a rare neurological disease, is now a young woman aged 22. Here we see her painting still lifes and singing along to the radio as the seasons ebb and flow around her. With music from Scanner and a whole plethora of cut-ups and voices from the film-maker’s sound archive, THIS OUR STILL LIFE exudes an evocative charge of melancholia and nostalgia.

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EDEN
Dir: Gideon Koppell.

A short film portrait of Eden Kötting from the director of SLEEP FURIOUSLY.
Project Arts Works – a Hastings based visual arts organization – commissioned several artist film makers to make portraits of young people with severe intellectual disabilities. This project – ‘In Transit’ – is funded by The Paul Hamlyn Foundation and East Sussex County Council.

The film portraits are intended to offer a rounded picture of each person as they make the difficult transition from a world of childhood care to finding support from adult social services. The portraits can be used by social services and other professionals in assessing the needs and aspirations of each individual in addition to the conventional paper based methods of description and assessment.

Followed by Q&A with Andrew and Eden Kötting.

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