Film Screening

Gyeonggye: Border

By Dr Bruce Crossman

For the film Gyeonggye, the concept is a type of travel metaphor (not literally) but with Korean traditional Gugak performance movement through physical locations of arches, gravestones into the hidden bush within a London cemetery (Abney Park in Stoke Newington). The idea is to move from hidden beauty within the bushscapes of the graveyard into skyward ascendance, and slowly return to arches/gravestones/ hidden bushes within the cemetery as ‘grief reflection’ and ‘healing’. The colour comes through gently as abstractionist painting approaches to show some burgeoning moments in nature as a metaphor to suggest healing processes amidst grief.

Sahim Omer Khalifa. (Kurdish director). (film still)

Cinema Beyond Borders

By Dr Tania Raouf

Cinema Beyond Borders is a feature-length documentary film about the contextual factors which shape Kurdish cinema and its identity. Cinema, in the Kurdish regions, gained momentum as a mechanism to voice the concerns of the Kurds and strengthen Kurdish identity in art. The film’s narrative unfolds through an analysis on past Kurdish films and film directors and the current stage of this endeavour.

Picnic Places

By Rob Nugent

Picnic Places is another take on Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky in a more benign place than Tarkovsky portrayed in Stalker. It’s about leftovers and signs in the landscape and missing pieces of information that have to be interpreted anew. Seen from the distant future, all pasts may go this way. Landscapes are invaded and reinvaded, with new searchers, who bring with them their own ways of interpreting, while leaving a trail of busted plaques.

Nature Calls The Shots

By Juan Francisco Salazar

Nature Calls the Shots is a 37-minute observational documentary film produced and directed by Juan Francisco Salazar that offers a glimpse into the life and work of pioneer permaculture designer and educator Robyn Francis, and the story of Djanbung Gardens in the community of Nimbin, northern New South Wales, Australia. Documenting a unique microcosm of an exceptional permaculture community on Australia’s north-east coast, Nature Calls the Shots presents Robyn Francis’ herstory as an activist for environmental regeneration and novel community economies who transformed a small piece of land from a degraded cow pasture in the 1990’s into to permaculture paradise.

Ntaria Heroes

By Shaun Angeles, Hart Cohen, Juan F. Salazar and Rachel Morley

Ntaria Heroes is a community collaborative project made with the students, teachers and researchers based at Ntaria (Hermannsburg) and Alice Springs. Students from the Ntaria School visit the Strehlow Research Centre under the guidance of elders and with the assistance of Aboriginal researchers. They are shown genealogies (family trees) going back three generations and photographs of their ancestors. This visit is extended by a day spent at the historical precinct of Hermannsburg - a former Lutheran mission. Here the students visit heritage buildings including an old church where community members of an older generation were baptised and married. The students are then invited to visit a Dreaming track belonging to one of the elders who provides a more direct experience of the spiritual connections made through the photos, family trees and old mission.

Distorted

By Des Devlin

Distorted: Reflections on early Sydney punk explores the recollections of participants who were part of a cohort associated with a small punk venue known as the Grand Hotel which operated at Railway Square, Sydney, between 1977 and 1979. While Australia’s first-wave moment has been increasingly recognised within a growing body of literature on punk, it has been considered almost exclusively in a music context. The film forms the creative component of a study that emphasises the sociality of punk subculture which has been largely absent from the record.