WHERE THE LOCAL TIME IS

Alchemy Film & Arts

Using film as a way to come together, have conversations and strengthen community.

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HEART OF HAWICK
SUNDAY 5 MAY
17:00 – 18:30 / 66′ + Q&A

Jessica Ashman, Jen Martin, Leo Torre Barral and Louise Barrington will be present for the Q&A.

The films in this programme have descriptive subtitles. The introduction and Q&A will have BSL interpretation.

Content warning: contains flashing imagery.

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Rachael Disbury

Between seasons, correspondences and continents, the seven films in Where The Local Time Is capture the intimacies, specificities and temporalities of place.

In Gloria Chung’s Electric Postcards, a lulling voiceover reflects on the mechanics of seeing and not seeing, on making and remembering images. Chung, a window-seat traveller, journeys across continents, contexts and concepts – anchoring the fleeting blurs of passing landscapes with diaristic, postmarked voice-notes. In Jessica Ashman’s Utopia Portals, we land in the artist’s ancestral homeland of Jamaica. Ashman’s fragmented layers of video, illustration, animation, and a transcendent soundtrack create an in-between space of colour and collage, expressing the complex realities and plural emotions associated with arriving at a home with which you are not wholly familiar.

In The Off-Season, Jen Martin takes us to a wind-battered village in Wester Ross in the Northwest Highlands of Scotland. Martin juxtaposes 8mm footage from family archives, 16mm footage of empty homes and working people, and a discordant soundtrack of their own design, punctuating the riveting flow of images with the statement, ‘Our mother points at houses that receive no mail’ – an ambiguous nod to the complex shifts of a population and geography. Familial reflection is continued in Erica Sheu’s It follows It passes on, as roots of intergenerational postwar sentiments from the Taiwanese islands of Kinmen are traced. Returning us to themes of seeing and not seeing, Sheu studies light through abstracted surfaces and experiments with concealment, suggesting wider reflections on Taiwanese identity.

In Todd Fraser’s Father Archie, buried and partially destroyed 16mm scenes of a local parish are accompanied by narration from the filmmaker’s grandfather. Fraser’s gorgeous, haunting film ruminates on folkloric notions of healing and rootedness to place, Nova Scotia, through images of abstraction and oral testimony in English and Gaelic. Leo Torre Barral’s Amapolas is a love-note sent 2000 km across continents, from the doorways and potted plants of Glasgow tenements to the wheat and sunflower fields of summertime in a place whose visuals can only be imagined. And, in Four Seasons, Louise Barrington invites us into the diverse and shifting images and soundscapes of Orkney across a year – granting generous access to the rhythms and patterns of its communities, ecologies, landscapes.

PROGRAMME