IMPROBABLE CINEMA
The Improbable Cinema is our special screening space, open for the whole three days of the festival (10am to 6pm, Fri, Sat and Sun) to show an eclectic range of short and feature length films. While there will be set times for specific screenings advertised, the Improbable Cinema is a more informal screening environment – you are free to come and go, dip in and out, as you please. If there’s something you’ve missed elsewhere, we might even be able to arrange to show it for you here. And it’s all free.
All Fall Down
Directed by: Philip Hoffman
Running time: 01:34:00
Year: 2009
Country: Canada
Synopsis:
All Fall Down (Philip Hoffman 94 min, 2009 Canada HDCAM) is an experimental documentary that takes a nineteenth century farmhouse in Southern Ontario, Canada, as its starting point. The film weaves together a complex temporal structure that juxtaposes the lives of two figures, one historical (a nineteenth century aboriginal woman and land rights activist) and the other contemporary (an ex-pat drifter and father of the filmmaker’s step daughter) across two hundred years. The film explores these characters through a variety of archival materials: diaries, landscape paintings, photographs, heritage films, poems, phone messages, maps, historical reenactments, songs) that express the complexity of time and the politics of land.
All Fall Down will be screened Friday 16:00, Saturday 15:20 and Sunday 15:20
Biography:
Philip Hoffman is a Canadian filmmaker.
Artist's website: http://www.philiphoffman.ca/
Venue: Festival Office - 5, Buccleuch Street
Screening date: October 22, 2011
Screening time: 15:15
Programme: Improbable cinema
Tickets: Free - this film will be screened on Fri, Sat and Sun (see above for details)
Castaic Lake
Directed by: Brigid McCaffrey
Running time: 00:28:30
Year: 2010
Country: United States
Synopsis:
Taking its course, the camera drifts in to the coves and surveys the shorelines of a multi-use reservoir to unearth fragments of its young history and consider a series of possible relationships to this artificial environment.
Castaic Lake will be screened Friday 11:45, Saturday 11:00 and Sunday 11:00
Biography:
Brigid McCaffrey is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker and photographer, working primarily in 16mm. Her documentaries have been screened in Rotterdam, London, Lisbon, New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere.
Filmography
Castaic Lake (28:30, 16mm, 2010)
AM/PM (9:00, 16mm, 2010)
Tjúba Ten/The Wet Season, co-directed w/ Ben Russell (47:00, 16mm, 2008)
Lay Down Tracks, co-directed w/ Danielle Lombardi (61:00, 16mm, 2006)
Venue: Festival Office - 5, Buccleuch Street
Screening date:
Screening time:
Programme: Improbable cinema
Tickets: Free - this film will be screened on Fri, Sat and Sun (see above for details)
Hydro
Directed by: Victoria Clare Bernie
Running time: 00:27:44
Year: 2011
Country: United Kingdom
Synopsis:
Hydro is a video mapping of the hydroelectric infrastructure of northern and western Scotland, a remarkable and controversial engineering project that wrote the monumental architecture of 20th century industry across the Highland landscape as an apparently seamless waterscape, a succession of dams and aqueducts, intakes and reservoirs.
Hydro will be screened Friday 12:30, Saturday 11:30 and Sunday 11:35
Biography:
Bernie’s video work has been shown in sites across Scotland and internationally. Her solo exhibitions include Cinematic Garden, for Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, and Idleness and the Dreamer at Bonhoga, Shetland. In 2006 she collaborated with architects metis in Northroom, Lighthouse, Glasgow. In 2007 she was awarded a Film and Video Umbrella Project Development Award and in 2008 her work was included in the Zoo Art Fair. In 2008-9 Bernie was the Leverhulme Trust artist in residence at SAMS Marine Laboratory near Oban. The work of the residency, Slow Water, was exhibited at Street Level Photoworks in 2011.
Artist's website: http://www.victoriaclarebernie.com
Venue: Festival Office - 5, Buccleuch Street
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Programme: Improbable cinema
Tickets: Free - this film will be screened on Fri, Sat and Sun (see above for details)
North West
Directed by: Katri Walker
Running time: 00:10:00
Year: 2011
Country: United Kingdom
Synopsis:
North West is a study of a Scottish landscape with its own history of indigenous displacement that uses cinematic language to make layered connections to the seductive visual and aural culture of the classic Hollywood Western. The work focuses specifically on John Ford's consistent location choice of Monument Valley through the geological parallels to Scotland's own sandstone inselbergs in Assynt. The film alludes to the historical relationship between Scottish emigration to the States and the emergence of the American cowboy while exploring mankind's relationship to land, land ownership and the visual depiction of land as a signifier for notions of nationalism. Wounded Knee, a singer and experimental vocalist, has created a sound piece to accompany the visuals within North West that draws on and plays with the melancholic tones of the Spaghetti Western and Scottish folk music to create a unique and ambiguous cinematic soundtrack.
North West will be screened Friday 13:00, Saturday 13:10 and Sunday 13:10
Biography:
Since 2002, Katri Walker (1978, Edinburgh) has been living between Mexico City and Glasgow where she graduated from the MFA at GSA in 2007. She works predominantly with video installation and has exhibited in group shows and had her work screened throughout the U.K, in Mexico, Australia, Iceland, The Netherlands, Venezuela, Estonia, Italy, Germany, Sweden and the U.S.A. Recent projects include a solo exhibition, North West, at Peacock Visual Arts in Aberdeen, a CCA Walls of Light Moving Image Commission and an international museum-touring group exhibition, Patria o Libertad! Katri is currently Artist-in-Residence at Stills Gallery, Edinburgh.
Artist's website: http://www.katriwalker.com
Venue: Festival Office - 5, Buccleuch Street
Screening date:
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Programme: Improbable cinema
Tickets: Free
SHIPWRECKED, MY LIFE FOR A BAG
Directed by: CLAUDIA BORGNA
Running time: 00:09:56
Year: 2010
Country: United Kingdom
Synopsis:
The artist dramatically interacts and eventually destroys her surrounding installation made out of thousand of recycled plastic bags filled with water. In an apocalyptic fictional storm the artist attempts to row half a boat stranded on a bed of dried wooden sticks. She is striving in the storm trying to steer to some unknown direction that might just lead to a brief moment of poetry.
Shipwrecked will be screened Friday 13:15, Saturday 13:25 and Sunday 13:25
Biography:
A Literature graduate from Genoa University Claudia received another BA from London Metropolitan University in Fine Art. Since then she has been exhibiting nationally and internationally. Claudia is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Grant, the Pollock Grant, the RBS Bursary Award as well as the Pritzker Foundation Endowed Fellowship Award. Short-listed for the BBC2 documentary: “School of Saatchi” in 2009 and for the British Women Art Prize in 2010 that same year she won of the ‘Public Speaks’ Broomhill NSP.
Artist's website: http://WWW.claudiaborgna.keepfree.de
Venue: Festival Office - 5, Buccleuch Street
Screening date:
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Programme: Improbable cinema
Tickets: Free - this film will be screened on Fri, Sat and Sun (see above for details)
The Angel of Callange
Directed by: Colin Andrews
Running time: 00:23:00
Year: 2010
Country: United Kingdom
Synopsis:
'The Angel of Callange' derives from a retracing of the first aerial voyage in Scotland. In 1785, Vincenzo Lunardi, made a daring 43 mile balloon voyage from Edinburgh to Callange.
The 'Angel of Callange' retraces a particular route, mirroring a specific journey in a different time. The labourers in the fields at Callange knew nothing of Lunardi and his launch in distant Edinburgh. They saw a large, round object appear in the sky and gradually descend towards them. As Lunardi descended he shouted to them through a silver trumpet he used to project his voice. The labourers, thinking an angel was descending upon them, fled in fear. The Angel of Callange will be screened Friday 11:00, Saturday 11:00 and Sunday 11:00.
Biography:
Colin Andrews was born in Northern Ireland in 1971 and now lives and works in Scotland. He studied Fine Art Photography at Glasgow School of Art and Electronic Media at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art. He has exhibited extensively internationally and currently works with a range of electronic and lens based media producing work for a variety of contexts including galleries, cinematic and public domains.
He juggles his practice with work as a lecturer in Photography and Film at Edinburgh Napier University.
Artist's website: http://www.colinandrews.org
Venue: Festival Office - 5, Buccleuch Street
Screening date:
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Programme: Improbable cinema
Tickets: Free - this film will be screened on Fri, Sat and Sun (see above for details)
Wasteland Utopias
Directed by: David Sherman
Running time: 01:37:00
Year: 2010
Country: United Kingdom
Synopsis:
Wasteland Utopias is a cinematic essay featuring visionary developer Del Webb (Sun City,AZ ) and legendary radical psychiatrist/naturalist Wilhelm Reich (Orgone Energy). What on earth could these two possibly have in common? The sunny Sonoran Desert for one thing, a shadowy CIA Operative for another. Desert landscapes, desert soulscapes, sex, sustainability, Emotional Plague, cloudbusting, water retention, cosmic intervention—these and other relevancies link the 1950s with our present moment in surprising, and seemingly prophetic, ways.
Wasteland Utopias will be screened Friday 14:00, Saturday 13:40 and Sunday 13:40
Biography:
David Sherman is a US based filmmaker.
Artist's website: http://www.totalmobilehome.com/
Venue: Festival Office - 5, Buccleuch Street
Screening date: October 22, 2011
Screening time: 13:30
Programme: Improbable cinema
Tickets: Free - this film will be screened on Fri, Sat and Sun (see above for details)
