by Luna Issa
In Welcome To The Daily Calm, ten films negotiate and navigate life’s cluttered desktops, its crowded frames, and the quiet chaos of its everyday routines.
In To Do, Saul Pankhurst playfully exhibits the challenges of proceeding through a mindfulness exercise without being overwhelmed by a comically cut-up collage of competing media and complementary thought-streams. Filming in the same spot each day for a year, Yoni Bentovim’s EXPIRED takes the ‘rubbish corner’ of a London estate as its structuring device, providing an ever-changing window into a life in which possession and occupation are constantly in flux.
Also using expired film stock, Chantal Partamian’s L’arbre powerfully compiles footage from Quebec and poetic prose from Beirut to reflect on the filmmaker’s own identity. In Jill, Uncredited, Anthony Ing celebrates ‘one of the world’s most prolific background actors’, taking time to centre on film and television extra Jill Goldston.
Autojektor’s robyn investigates the uneasy relationship between identity and technology, using the desktop as a kind of mirror and examining the extent to which a face can be distorted until it is no longer recognisable by AI. Identity is explored further in Jamal Ademola’s “Who Should I be in the World?”. Documentary, animation and live-action footage are blended to illustrate the fragmented and multiple cultural experiences of a Portuguese-speaking Angolan model who’s grown up in Montreal.
Haneen Hadiy’s The Distance Exists Between also explores notions of belonging and displacement. Using split-screen and sound that is almost dream-like, the filmmaker exhibits the tension in identity that comes with leaving one’s home country – in this instance, Iraq. Collage-like aesthetics continue in Angelo Madsen Minax’s Bigger on the Inside, in which the filmmaker combines images of desktop chatrooms, star-gazing and digital sketching to reflect on the possibilities of transness.
In a more hand-made style, Wendy Kirkup’s rough cut botanical uses a matte box to create multiple and simultaneous analogue images of animals and flora while a voiceover speaks to their materiality. In Before Iftar, Julie Halazy captures street scenes in Morocco a few minutes prior to the fast-breaking evening meal of Ramadan, presenting one take for each of its 28 days.
