Peter van Hoof

“A stunning montage depicts the destruction of a London street to make way for new roads. The rhythmic, emotive soundtrack is partly musical and partly a collage of the residents’ voices. Shots and sounds echo and cross-link in the film’s 14 minutes to reinvent a radical documentary tradition.” A.L. Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video, 1999

After the revolution in 1979, Iran prohibited the depiction of men and women touching on the silver screen. Since then, directors have relied on every cinematic trick in the book to mirror the ecstatic release of tension through touch – but often it is the game of glances that is enough to set a scene ablaze. Nazarbazi collages these saturated cinematic moments into a poem about love and desire in Iranian film, that also echoes our own time of physical distancing.

May 2014: two unarmed Palestinian teens are killed by Israeli soldiers on the West Bank. Abu Hamdan made an audio analysis to ascertain whether rubber or live bullets were used. The film centres on the gunfire, yet no shots are heard. Rubber Coated Steel does not preside over the voices of the victims but seeks to amplify their silence, questioning the ways in which rights are being heard today.

Sitting by the campfire, a boy from Dakar named Serigne tells his two friends the story of his sea voyage as a stowaway. Not only he, but everyone in his surroundings seems to be continually obsessed by the idea of trying to cross the sea. His words reverberate like a melancholy poem. A story about boys who are continually travelling: between past, present and future, between life and death, history and myth.

Bernadette presents an unravelling, yet accumulatively open-ended portrayal of the female Irish dissident and political activist, Bernadette Devlin. Cutting between archival material, animation, and scripted voice-over, Jarman Award nominee Duncan Campbell’s film is interested in fusing documentary and fiction in order to assess both the subject matter and the mode of communicating it, striving for what Samuel Beckett terms, ‘a form that accommodates the mess’

Oh, and how could I forget In My Car? This one’s got a road-trip feel, except instead of happy singalongs, it’s packed with raw emotions and maybe even some car snacks (okay, not really, but you can imagine). Following that, The Game throws you into a psychological maze. It’s fun yet unsettling, kinda like playing hide-and-seek in the dark.(MH)

#11, Marey <-> Moiré explores the discontinuity inherent in the film medium. All images are created by capturing the movement of a line at intervals, echoing the chronophotographic techniques of Étienne-Jules Mare.

Hair is a key marker of Black female identity. Many films have been made about it, but Yasmin Thayná's debut film is among the best. This powerful visual essay, a form of resistance to invisibility, is an audiovisual experience about being and becoming a Black woman.

The Smell of Burning Ants is a haunting documentary on the pains of growing up male. It explores the inner and outer cruelties that boys perpetrate and endure. The film provokes the viewer to reflect on how our society can deprive boys of wholeness.

A metaphor of creation. Spirals, circles, and abstract forms move against alternating dark and light backgrounds. An orb changes color, appearing in flash frames. Dots resembling stars or atoms and galaxies with shooting stars are created on the screen. The stars then order themselves into lines. Exploding sunbursts end the film.