This film night is free but booking is essential, please book via Ticket Tailor.

Join us for a relaxed and informal film night, as artist-in-residence Natasha Ruwona presents a series of artists’ short films that tell stories of different landscapes and our relationships with them. Sharing films by Marwa Arsanios, Natasha and Arjuna Newman, we will travel across the UK and to Lebanon, to explore the politics, memories and time of land and landscape and consider how film as a medium can create hope for the future through world-building practices.

Feel free to BYOB (bring your own bottle) and snacks. There will be popcorn and teas available.

Films:

Who Is Afraid of Ideology Part 4: Reverse Shot
Marwa Arsanios, 2022
This fourth chapter of Arsanios’ Who is Afraid of Ideology? series continues a collaborative investigation of anti-capitalist ideas around property and land ownership in Lebanon. The film’s figurative reverse shot reflects land as an autonomous, living object that inherently resists notions of property. Instead, matter and land become witness to the interconnectedness of the geological, the historical, the legal and the agricultural – generating an ecology of thought centred around land as a site of communalisation and rehabilitation.

What is held (between waters)
Natasha Ruwona (2023)
Flowing through Hawick, the River Teviot’s Atlantic connections and its memory are speculated upon in what is held (between waters). Atlantic Salmon guide the story of home, time, and water’s ecology as river structures become the space to examine the futurities of environmental un/knowings.

Syncopated Green
Arjuna Newman (2022)
Syncopated Green calls on the history of outdoor free parties to re-describe the English Countryside. The film listens to rave music, past and present, to help forget the official portrayal of England as picturesque, nostalgic, white, and rural. These traditional images of a “proper” England not only prop up the walls of national museums still today, but they also feed a growing conservatism that sustains Imperial fantasies, slavery legacies and Brexit realities. Music, especially music inspired by nature and designed to be played in the outdoors, has a unique way of expressing the landscape. Syncopated Green aims to include rave music into the English landscape genre and tradition – turning imperial history inside out. Rave music and its wider culture, importantly, celebrates black and brown artists and audiences, and has done so since its inception. Somewhere between a music video, a memoir, and an essay, the film asks, how might the current socio-political situation and looming future be different if we had other histories to lean on and dance with?