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HEART OF HAWICK
SATURDAY 4 MAY
12:00 – 13:30 / 66′ + Q&A

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Chris Paul Daniels, Catriona Gallagher and Nariman Massoumi 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; discussion of classism, sexism, injury, imperialism, poverty; depiction of nudity.

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Rachael Disbury

In Lands Of Make Believe, four films scrutinise mythmaking as the basis and backdrop of narratives taken for granted – those of nationhood, colonialism, erasure and empire. 

Sarah Ballard’s Heat Spells ruminates on landscapes of tourism in St Augustine, Florida. Unearthing traces of the conquistador Juan Ponce de León, enduring quests for the mythical Fountain of Youth, and the colonial and contradictory origins of the United States, Ballard juxtaposes analogue footage of green spaces and flowing waters with visitor maps and consumer attractions, complemented by found voiceovers from tour guides and late-night televangelists. If all this evokes a kind of authenticity industrial complex, it finds its epitome in images of ornate, mass-produced home-garden water fountains. 

Suggestion becomes speculation in Chris Paul Daniels’s Is there anybody there?, an assemblage of 70 twentieth-century films (1901 – 1999) from Manchester Metropolitan University’s North West Film Archive. Daniels stitches together poetically vibrant imagery of carnivals, communal ceremonies, fancy-dress occasions; a scripted voiceover narrates these local spectacles with puns and provocations, situating them within something more sweepingly poetic. In animating primary subjects from the past, the film asks more than its title question, posing further complex ponderings around how we assign value to memory.

Catriona Gallagher’s Daphne was a torso ending in leaves centres on a heroine of classical mythology. Reanimating Daphne’s metamorphosis from woman to laurel tree, following her plea for protection from Apollo’s pursuits, Gallagher questions the obliteration and abstraction implicit in the tale. Guiding us through Daphne’s materiality and centrality, from the high-status symbol of the laurel wreath to the nourishing staple of the bay leaf, Gallagher intervenes upon feminine erasure with an immersive soundtrack, transfixing 16mm imagery and a carefully paced text-based suspense. 

In Pouring Water On Troubled Oil, Nariman Massoumi focuses on a more contemporary example of erasure: the establishing years of the Anglo Iranian Oil Company, now known as British Petroleum. Massoumi traces Dylan Thomas’s 1951 visit to Iran, following a commission from the company to develop a script for a promotional film that never got made. Through colonial archive photographs and the lyrical prose of Thomas – delivered by the actor Michael Sheen – Pouring Water On Troubled Oil expertly charts the sinister, extractive realities of imperialism.

PROGRAMME

IS THERE ANYBODY THERE?
Chris Paul Daniels
17’20 – UK – 2023

POURING WATER ON TROUBLED OIL
Nariman Massoumi
25’56 – UK – 2023