by Jonathan Ali
At mines and coalfields, across night shifts and bank heists, the five shorts in A Comrade Approaches meditate on the textures and residues of labour. Moving Sound by Sadia Pineda Hameed speculates upon convergences of labour action across space and time, as well as histories real and imagined. Proceeding from present-day organising around miners’ strikes, the film considers the fictive use of audio technology to transmit strategies for resistance to the workers in and around the coal pits of 1980s Wales, in a para-national gesture of creative solidarity.
Questions of the visibility of labour are considered in Rachel McBrinn’s Grit, which documents the usually unseen night work of the Grounds and Gardens team of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital as they grit the site in the winter cold for patients, staff and visitors before the day begins. Through this observant act, the film ruminates upon the manifold ways in which care can be enacted within a hospital setting, while also serving as a memorialisation of vital labour.
Fransisca Angela’s prismatic The Magnolia Grows at Night considers care as an aspect of religious devotion and postcolonial legacy. Set within a convent in Maastricht in the Netherlands, where Indonesian nuns engage in caring for the elderly Dutch nuns residing there, the film is constructed as a polyvocal and multilingual patchwork of interwoven fragments of daily life, conversations and testimonies. The result is an intimate and searching meditation on the giving and receiving of care, and how the act of caregiving can shift over the passage of time.
Different types of labour are considered in Sofía Gallisá Muriente’s true crime documentary subversion A Bundle of Silences, which approaches a 1983 event in which millions of dollars were expropriated from a bank in Connecticut by a Puerto Rican pro-independence group. Interlocking fragments of testimony, processed images and archive, the film unfolds the work done by the Los Macheteros militants alongside that of migrant agricultural labourers from Puerto Rico on the farms of New England. What emerges is an affective narrative of oppression, exploitation and resistance, and the necessary gaps that keep the historical record incomplete.
Matt Feldman’s Las Animas concludes the programme as it began, with coal. Situated in the wilderness-covered fields of southeastern Colorado, once a coal-mining region, this analogue journey conjures the ghosts of a bloody labour struggle that took place in the early 1900s. The haunted camera drifts through landscapes seemingly benign, composing an elegy to a dark, invisibilised history of state violence and unresolved trauma.
