FROM THE DEPTHS

Alchemy Film & Arts

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

WELCOME > SCHEDULE > SCREENINGS > FROM THE DEPTHS

HEART OF HAWICK
SATURDAY 3 MAY
10:00 – 11:30 / 64′ + Q&A

Bobbi Cameron and Crimson DM Lily 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 displacement; depiction of guns/weapons, climate anxiety, insects, chewing.

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Francisco Llinas

In From The Depths, six films span and stretch across ancestral lineages, linguistic legacies, dreamworlds in deep time.

In for the first words of a dreamworld, Bobbi Cameron interweaves conversations with her grandfather, the striking landscape of the Isle of Seil, and ritualistic movements evocative of Celtic shamanism. The result is an intimate portrait of the artist’s relationship with heritage and her familial experience with dementia – one that challenges linear understandings of history and memory.

At the centre of Maya Jeffereis’s Passages II lies a similar enquiry into familial memory and heritage. Jeffereis focuses on the experience of her Japanese great-grandparents as sugar labourers in Hawaiʻi as a point of departure; layering archival footage, cyanotypes and poetry, the artist zooms out from the personal to compellingly trace the interwoven histories of resistance and colonial exploitation across the Pacific and the Caribbean.

In Tai a Mynyddeodd, Crimson DM Lily merges her textile practice with ongoing research into Welsh heritage. The resulting film is an immersive inspection of the Welsh landscape, exploring how gender roles and capitalist fashion shape language and cultural identity. Themes of capitalism, landscape, and time also take the centre stage in Green Grey Black Brown, in which Yuyan Wang juxtaposes scenes of oil extraction, environmental devastation and the production of synthetic flora, questioning the temporal paradox of futures built on fossil fuel.

This entanglement of time, landscape, and petro-capitalism is further examined in Plastic Aortas. From dawn to dusk, Malic Amalya captures the plastic tarping that blankets a reservoir built on the ancestral land of Native American people of the Massachusett, Pawtucket and Naumkeag tribes. Designed to prevent the growth of invasive plant species, the plastic simultaneously suffocates and protects, suspending time by enveloping the landscape in synthetic stagnation.

The programme culminates with Luciana Decker Orozco’s puro andar | Language of the Entrails, in which time, heritage and landscape are accessed through the work of Gamaliel Churata, a major representative of Latin American literary indigenism. Churata’s Andean cosmovision – where the dead are the genesis of the living – is brilliantly and beguilingly rendered by the artist as a superimposition of geological and ritualistic temporalities, and the perpetual motion of new and old identities.

PROGRAMME