TIME PASSES

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
10:00 – 11:30 / 62′ + Q&A

George Finlay Ramsay, Miglė Križnauskaitė and Eva van Tongeren, producer of Bamssi, 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 displacement, climate anxiety; depiction of animal carcasses, insects, skin-picking, war.

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Jonathan Ali

In Time Passes, four films articulate a vision of cinema as connector, mediator, a tool for conversation and reflection.

George Finlay Ramsay’s Nursted, from the sleep side approaches its subject twice, in contrasting ways. Led by the filmmaker’s playfully arch narration, we first enter a decaying English country house at night, moving through space, time and past lives conjured through surreal fragments. Come morning, the film gracefully shifts modes, the lives previously evoked now touchingly re-presented through testimony, archive and portraiture.

In Kearra Amaya Gopee’s Ca(r)milla, portraiture is a point of departure for a playful subversion of tropes attending figures from Caribbean folklore. Taking the form of a fictionalised documentary fragment, the film centres around Camilla, a centuries-old Trinidadian vampire played by the filmmaker’s mother. The filmmaker engages in vérité observation and rapid-fire dialogue with their subject, who details her money-making enterprise of selling native soil to vampires in the diaspora, adding a layer of exilic longing to this complex, funny work.

The conventional documentary portrait is also destabilised in Miglė Križinauskaitė’s Blue Mountain. White Cloud, in which the filmmaker travels from her home in Lithuania to South Korea ostensibly to make a work about Won Bo Sunim, a Lithuanian woman who went to South Korea decades ago and became a Zen monk. From the outset, however, an existential unease occupies the filmmaker; in revealing her anxieties about life and family to Sunim, she constructs a conversation between them. What results is a work in which the roles of artist and subject are beautifully blurred, cinema acting as a quietly powerful means of self-reflection.

Cinema as a means of mediation subtends Mourad Ben Amor’s Bamssi. Deploying the camera as an extension of his body, the filmmaker rapturously immerses himself in the world of his family home and its surroundings in Tunisia, which includes a diverse coterie of goats, chickens, sheep, cats and dogs. Yet the everyday joys in which the film revels find themselves in tension with other realities, including the war on Gaza, and a yearning to depart. ‘My hand is open to life,’ says the filmmaker, echoing the poet Paul Éluard. ‘We must accept it, and must try to change it.’

PROGRAMME