by Milo Clenshaw
In Things That Linger, the first shorts programme of Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival 2025, diaries and dispatches unfold in dialogue, as four films map identity through quotation, questioning and correspondence.
Produced as part of a wider project in homage to the late Chantal Akerman, Rebecca Jane Arthur’s Barefoot Birthdays on Unbreakable Glass presents a triptych of intimate 16mm portraits of three women. While the artist remains behind the camera, she is reflected in the proximity and tenderness of each relationship, capturing glimpses of gestures both enacted and embodied. The quartet comes together to celebrate a birthday, leaving behind earlier conversations around mother-daughter relationships, creativity, migration and identity for a joyful moment of communality.
Niya Abdullahi’s Nalashi offers a further exploration of maternal relationships and identity as the filmmaker and her mother share their Saturday afternoon ritual of hashar qahwa, an Ethiopian coffee ceremony. As the film shifts between confessional dialogue, poetry and song, the tension between their obvious affection for one another and their inevitable differences comes to the fore. The space is interrupted by a split screen of personal archive, hinting towards familial, cultural and political histories that inform and haunt the onscreen conversation.
As its tongue-in-cheek title suggests, Lewis Teckkam’s Thinking Allowed invites a playful investigation into the nature of creative thought. Plural voices, including that of the filmmaker, take turns to narrate a poem inspired by a line from Hamlet. While evocative images gesture towards the shifting ideas contained within the quotation, water emerges as a central motif – from powerful rivers to individual raindrops – mirroring the film’s own fluid perspective.
Part documentary, part suburban horror, Elian Mikkola‘s the house was there before me diarises the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic as the filmmaker and their partner move into a house that belonged to an elderly relative, and which has gone unchanged for thirty years. Analogue and digital images blur, each retaining ghostly artefacts that haunt the screen and the house’s inhabitants. The suffocation of living in someone else’s house, and someone else’s life, is palpable, but the couple’s interventions into the space feel radical and ultimately freeing.
