PLACES WE KNEW

Alchemy Film & Arts

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

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HEART OF HAWICK
SATURDAY 3 MAY
12:00 – 13:30 / 62′ + Q&A

Owain Train McGilvary, Elena Horgan, Samy Benammar, Jules Leaño and Autojektor 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, strong language; discussion of death, poverty, displacement; depiction of religious iconography.

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Jonathan Ali

In Places We Knew, seven films ponder erasure and reanimation, community and memory, and loss as its own form of presence.

In Owain Train McGilvary’s Seeing Red, archival photographs are digitally manipulated and set to an electronic score as a means of reanimating the Three Crowns, a now-lost gay bar in North Wales. The digressive narration, delivered in Welsh and English, underscores the artist’s intersectional approach to the memorialising of a community space. In Zazie Ray-Trapido’s Language Decay, language is a means of evoking memory of a past self, hidden but never lost, and which is both imperfectly and beautifully retrieved in the artist’s present act of filming her immigrant grandmother.

The loss of language and erasure of identity via colonialism is the point of departure in Elena Horgan’s elegiac Cumha. Over images of the Irish landscape, the filmmaker meditates on history and having one’s native tongue stolen, before making a poignant linguistic gesture towards reclaiming what was erased. In Samy Benammar’s travelogue before seriana, colonialism has left its presence on the physical landscape of the mountains of the artist’s Algerian homeland – creating a mythical landscape in its place. The camera’s uneasy search for home creates a new and complex map of identity and belonging.

As with Benammar’s film, Jules Leaño’s collage work Inheritance is framed as an address to the filmmaker’s mother, on a first visit to the latter’s Filipino homeland. Distressed celluloid footage and archival photographs work as an analogue to the filmmaker’s potentially error-ridden narration in Tagalog – a language she doesn’t speak, from a place she knows, and perhaps can only ever (re)claim imperfectly.

A decidedly more intense attempt at reclamation takes place in Autojektor’s rot. The film presents a barrage of decrepit analogue images of a figure dancing in an eerie landscape, edited in time with a score of creepily manipulated voices and electronic growls: a two-minute folk-horror nightmare.

Finally, in Darryl Daley’s tender Youlogy / No Ghosts, we return to an act of memorialisation, for the filmmaker’s grandmother. Footage of the grandmother’s funeral in her Jamaican homeland is overlaid with testimonial text of her coming to the UK decades before, while a sequence featuring Black figures in an urban landscape movingly affirms presence as a mirror to absence.

PROGRAMME