AND ENTER

Alchemy Film & Arts

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

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HEART OF HAWICK
SUNDAY 4 MAY
12:00 – 13:30 / 64′ + Q&A

Louis Scantlebury, Juliana Kasumu, Lou Lou Sainsbury, Martyna Ratnik and Madison Brookshire 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: discussion of war, displacement, death, sexism; depiction of partial nudity.

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Michael Pattison

And Enter – in the final shorts programme of Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival 2025, seven films interrogate the meaning of thresholds, constellations, collaborations and portals.

Louis Scantlebury’s Seek Beyond spans an unusual range of registers given the limited emotions at its protagonist’s disposal. Deploying a sock puppet, bound to the bottom-left corner of his image, the artist searches for community away from the urban bustle – and finds it, in a field, until the crowds disperse. In Consider, Ж approximates the flicker of distant stars. Perforating the film strip, the artist constellates and sustains an abstract image that is never not moving, even when it is still – its silence providing much space for reflection prior to and magnified by a poetic footnote commemorating the fallen in Gaza.

Bookended by the sonic clatter of fireworks and firecrackers, Weipeng Huang’s Happy New Year is an ambiguous evocation of the gap between familial and national sovereignty. While the artist’s family enjoys an annual end-of-year meal, the televisual extravaganza of China’s Spring Festival Gala plays out with suspiciously hegemonic imperatives. In Adura Baba Mi, Juliana Kasumu pairs audio testimonies from her parents with observational imagery of East Street Parish, the Celestial Church of Christ in Southeast London where her father is a religious leader. An intimate documentary on the one hand, the film is also a poetic portrait of a community, homing in on its textures and rhythms with startling analogue footage – and a transcendent coda in digital.

In A Fantastic Body, Lou Lou Sainsbury evokes an equally transcendent notion of becoming. In an act of optical expansion, the artist transforms her apartment into an opened-out ritual site shot in wide angle. A chronicle unfolds in close-up: a body and a self, personifying the sun, are tenderly and lovingly re-birthed. In she’s waiting for the sunset, Martyna Ratnik explores the gap between memory and image, the personal and the social: where might one of these end, the other begin? Switching between monochrome and a cobalt hue, between voice and onscreen text, between a manufactured echo and the kind of futuristic drone music that harks back to a past that never existed, this is a layered and elusive work of gentle collisions.

And Set: Madison Brookshire’s programme closer is a seemingly single-take hymn to the blues above us. In typically minimalist fashion, Brookshire’s upward-facing camera captures a dusk in real-time, the gradual disappearance of cloudless azure only amplifying an apparent sonic crescendo, as birdsong is accompanied by the gentle soars of what sounds like rush-hour traffic.

PROGRAMME