WELCOME > SCHEDULE > SCREENINGS > REMAKE REMODEL

HEART OF HAWICK
SATURDAY 4 MAY
10:00 – 11:30 / 68′ + Q&A

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Autojektor and Rachel McBrinn 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, sustained intense sound; discussion of racism, injury; depiction of nudity, sex, racism, orientalism.

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Milo Clenshaw

In Remake Remodel, four films persuasively re-enter history – arresting its development and intervening upon its systems of violence and renewal. 

The programme begins with a scream, with Autojektor’s 83-second CLOSET WITCH – My Words Are Sacred. There is no easing in with this film: chopped-up analogue images of trans porn cut across the screen in time with raging heavy metal. This is a film that demands to be heard, its cacophony laying bare the discrepancy between a culture that fetishises trans bodies while simultaneously denying their existence. 

While CLOSET WITCH sets out its argument with a shout, Michelle Williams Gamaker’s Thieves takes time to build its case. Lovingly remodelling the film sets of the 1924 and 1940 versions of The Thief of Bagdad through the imagined perspectives of Chinese-American actor Anna May Wong and Indian-born American actor Sabu, Williams Gamaker allows these simultaneously exoticised and excluded figures to reclaim and recentre their narratives – refusing a film history built on structural racism to ensure their survival at all costs. 

Rachel McBrinn’s Are you going my way? takes the programme to Deans South, one of Livingston’s first council housing schemes, as its buildings are demolished to make way for yet another reworking of the postwar New Town’s landscape. Former residents – and the filmmaker’s family members – peer through metal grating for an eerie glimpse of their old homes, posters still on the wall. The film is a complex portrait of a place in flux, and a reminder of how architecture shapes communal archives; combining analogue and digital forms, it evokes questions around what might be lost through apparent technological advancement. 

Devin Jie Allen’s Forbidden City centres on the discovery and presence of the filmmaker’s own late grandmother in archive footage depicting the final days of Detroit’s Chinatown in the 1960s – prior to its demolition and displacement through urban renewal. It’s a fragmentary film, a patchwork of images and motifs relating to the cultural identity of a place both actual and imagined, mediated and elusive. As the narration states, ‘I call out to you through the image, and you speak to me in ways I can’t foresee.’

PROGRAMME

THIEVES
Michelle Williams Gamaker
27’27 – UK – 2023

FORBIDDEN CITY
Devin Jie Allen
13’15 – USA – 2023