Hackney Film Festival 2012

Hackney Film Festival 2012 from Hackney Film Festival on Vimeo.
7 - 9 September 2012

directed by Steven McInerney & Stuart Heaney
sound by Tom White - Exposure 42 'Interior Building' from Exposures, My Dance The Skull (Art Editions) 2012 http://www.mydancetheskull.com

Full Programme

Friday 7 September. 8pm
Hackney Film Festival & Live Cinema Foundation Opening Night
The New Empowering Church
£8 before 10pm. £10 thereafter

The Festival opens on Friday 7 September with a collaborative event between the HFF and the Live Cinema Foundation. The Live Cinema Foundation is a new Hackney based organisation that supports the presentation, development and publication of emerging digital culture that exist at the intersection between film, music and the performing arts. For this special one off event it has joined forces with HFF to co-curate a night of audio-visual delights that celebrates local artists operating in this field.

Scanner performing Unto The Edges

'Unto The Edges' is a performance of sound and image. It is like the delicate movement of a watch spinning through space. Microscopic clicks, wood blocks and everyday sounds are painted over rumbling, dark canvases. Ultimately, by puling himself on the line Scanner manages to inject a form of music that is often distant and impersonal with warmth, human frailty and humour." The Guardian Newspaper''

The Light Surgeons performing LDN-REDUX

'LDN-REDUX' is a multichannel audio visual performance explores the landscape and architecture of London through a combination of live video remix and live electronic musical score. The piece paints an anthropomorphic portrait of London which encourages its audience to contemplate the city as a living organism. In parallel with this kaleidoscopic view of the every day life, the performance seeks to explore the city as a complex structure through its relationship with a more hidden landscape of digital information. The resulting audio visual journey transports its audience through this sprawling metropolis to reveal its human activities as an abstract dance over a 24-hour cycle.

Scanone live A/V set

Director, Editor, Sound Designer and Label boss of Yellow Machines, Jude Greenaway aka Scanone is a London-based Audio Visual artist who has been producing, performing and releasing music for well over a decade. In that time he has managed to develop a sound that skirts around the lunatic fringes of a myriad of underground genres, from bass-heavy electronics to glitched-up cinematic IDM. For this performance he will be showcasing some fresh new material from his forthcoming DVD compilation and new unheard / seen cinematic audio visual works with music from himself and the Yellow Machines label.

Blanca Regina and Matthias Kispert performing Banquet.

Banquet - Live Cinema Performance mixes sound and visual material collected by the artists together with appropriated footage from advertising, to create a poetic investigation of food and its manifold cultural relevances. If the circumstances permit, the artists will even prepare some of the stuff live on stage for the audience to enjoy during and after the show!

Spatial (dj set)

Echoes of haunted dancehalls and distant raves in London town.. In late 2008 spatial subverted the UK bass scene by releasing a limited 10" on his newly christened infrasonics imprint. The expansion of dubstep's horizon with a technoid garage hybrid combined with the minimal aesthetic of the design and information reticence proved compelling in an age of categorisation and communication overload. The release scored an instant Boomkat single of the week and all but sold out inside two weeks.

The Butchers (vj set)

The Butchers is a collective of freelancers, film maker, video artist, art director working with film and performing arts. Their live performance ranges from vj sets to a conceptual collaboration with specially produced audio visuals, focusing on the live interchange between music and a cinematic interpretation of light, movement, and a surrounded urban
environment.

Champetamine (dj set)

HFF resident Champetamine is a vinyl purist specializing in dub infused techno
mixed with slices of electronica and glitchy tribal rhythms- you never quite know what's in Champetamine's bag of tricks.

Joe Catchpole

Joe Catchpole is a Hackney based visual artist who creates bespoke video, motion graphics and display installations. His work has been seen at Music Festivals, in Art Galleries, Nightclubs, Corporate Events, Theatres and even on TV once or twice.

Nano Projections – Paulskiart

Paul Skawinski is an analogue visual designer and founder of Nano Projections. In 2009 Paul invented custom liquid projector "Illuminati 1.2" (patent pending), which creates “organic projections" up to 20 meters in diameter. The content inside petri dish is subject to chemical & physical reactions that occur during mixing process. Nano Visuals take you into the journey of your own fantasies and dreams; they will trigger your imagination & soul.

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Saturday 8 September. 4pm
Hackney Film Festival short film programme (15) 80m
Rio Cinema. £6 at box office.

Selected from over 100 entries the Hackney Film Festival brings you their most exciting programme to date of independent to BAFTA award winning cinema.
Running time: 80m.


PITCH BLACK HEIST
(Victoria 2011) dir. John Maclean 14m
John Maclean Liam (Liam Cunningham) and Michael (Michael Fassbender) are professional safe crackers who meet on a simple job to relieve an office safe from its contents. The catch is a light activated alarm system impelling the men to embark on a pitch black heist.

THE PUB
(Haggerston 2012) dir Joseph Pierce 8m
Kemi lives and works in the murky slipstream of a North London pub. As the booze flows the line between who belongs behind and in front of the bar becomes increasingly blurred.

SHIFT
(Hoxton 2012) dir. Max Hattler 3 min
Using the New Age idea of a 'dimensional shift' as inspiration, Shift combines science fiction themes through abstract, stop motion animation of objects and colour.

SNOW
(Dalston 2012) dir. Peter Middleton 5m
Shot on high grain 8mm film, Snow is a short-form documentary narrated by John Hull. Having lost his sight 30 years ago, John takes us into the strange, ethereal world of the blind: a world dependent on sight and touch alone. The result is a thought-provoking and poetic account of the impact of snowfall on the lives of people living without sight.

82
(Dalston 2012) dir. Calum MacDiarmid 6m
A postman lets us into his dark world in quiet suburbia.

INVADE ALL OF THE HUMANS
(Haggerston 2012) dir. Tom and Mark 2m
Invade all of the Humans is a micro-musical-comedy pilot about two obsolete and unhinged retro robot toys with delusions of world domination. Calculord 3 and PX Micron are a pair of discarded educational toys from the 80’s who now live in park and spend their days laughing at humans and planning their invasion of Earth. They also enjoy performing electronic music and dance routines. Calculord 3 and PX Micron run on four AA batteries.

TRIBE
(Victoria 2011) dir Cyril Gfeller 4min
Inspiration taken from the album cover titled my “wilderness” by Piers Faccini. Made entirely of maps this stop motion masterpiece tells the story of a man in his many forms. You will be taken on a musical journey echoed perfectly with visions of tribes, colours and visual entertainment

THE ODYSSEY
(Stoke Newington 2012) dir Asif Kapadia 30 min
The Odyssey, is a mixture of aerial photography, audio interviews and archive. It canvases the opinions of Londoners from the point where the Olympics were first won by London up to the point when it happens … with all the ups and downs on the way.

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Saturday 8 September. 8pm
An evening of expanded cinema
Cafe OTO. £10 on the door

The Hackney Film Festival steps outside the confines of the cinema setting and explores the film and video art practice of Expanded Cinema for an evening with Hackney's most imaginative and innovative performance artists.

SCULPTURE
Sculpture is electronic music producer, Dan Hayhurst and animator, Reuben Sutherland – manipulating digital and analogue media into energetic sonic and visual amalgams, inspired by a continuum of exploratory practice in music and abstract film and video while following their own idiosyncratic vision – a DIY aesthetic encompassing pop, appropriative collage, cut & spliced techno, noise, early electronics, the avant garde and comic strips, mechanical and digital animation techniques, tape edits and computer programming, heart and head, past and future.

Dan Hayhurst plays digital media devices, reel to reel tape recorder, sampler, effectron and walkman.

Reuben Sutherland plays video zoetrope record deck, ‘DJing’ with psychophonotropic picture discs which animate when filmed, beaming looping fragments of surreal, luridly coloured imagery into eyeballs and brains at 25 frames per second – Victorian mechanical imaging technology combined with digital video.

GUY SHERWIN
Cycles #3
2003 (1972)
c.9 mins b/w & colour Optical sound 16 mm
Projector performance for 2x16mm projectors with optical soundtracks.

Cycles #3 is a live projection event for two 16mm projectors and two loudspeakers. The material used in Cycles (1972/77) is recycled for two screens and two soundtracks, with one tinted screen set inside a second b/w screen. This combination gives rise to a surprising range of induced colours and afterimages, as well as complex cross-rhythms in the soundtrack. The projector performance includes subtle shifts of focus with changes in volume and tone.

Sherwin studied painting at Chelsea School of Art in the late 1960s. His subsequent film works often use serial forms and live elements, and engage with light and time as fundamental to cinema. Recent works include performances that use multiple projectors and optical sound, and installations made for an exhibition space.

Sherwin taught printing and processing at the London Film-Makers' Co-op (now LUX) during the mid-70s. His films were included in 'Film as Film' Hayward Gallery 1979, 'Live in Your Head' Whitechapel Gallery 2000, 'Shoot Shoot Shoot' Tate Modern 2002, 'A Century of Artists' Film & Video' Tate Britain 2003/4. He lives in London and teaches at Middlesex University and University of Wolverhampton.

SALLY GOLDING
In her performance this evening, Golding will use torchlight printed sound film, hacked sonic devices, motorised colour filters, stroboscopic light, refracting lenses and physical interference, Golding warps the output of the projector’s light and sound into a hypnotic and frantic field of colour, form and noise fuzz.

Golding is currently based in London and hails from Brisbane, Australia. Golding combines film projection with performance and installation creating live cine-sculptures and interactions. Golding deploys folly and foray into physiological cinematics, creating embodied beams and alchemical projection performance. Photographic compositions printed as optical soundtracks and decomposed uprooted vinyl library music neatly situate Golding’s work at the crossroads of science and superstition, philosophy and pulp. Deconstruction of cinematic materials and apparatus reveal slippage between materialist investigation, sculptural forms, and bodily intervention - redesigning the cinematic viewing experience, exposing the typically locked process of beam-audience-screen. Cracked cinema for darkroom compositions, light bleed, contorted projection sports, dismembered narrative, strained sonorousness, whimsical instructional and wanton optics.

www.sallygolding.com

LYNN LOO
A Study
Deriving from previous multiple 16mm film projection works. A study is a work in progress incorporating video and 16mm film projection.

Loo made a transition from a music background to filmmaking in 1997. She studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she acquired her Bachelor of Fine Art. A way to describe her films is that they are compositions of images and sound that suggest narratives or convey an event without text or words. Unfinished Symphony (2001, 16mm) and Floating (2004, super-8) are examples of that.

In 2004, Loo was introduced to films made from makers involved in the London Filmmakers’ Co-op. Works specifically from the ‘70s. This has influenced her present work where the exploration of filmmaking has moved to an investigation of the celluloid and presenting works in a performance element with multiple projectors. Her first film from this is '0' (2004, 16mm), followed by Vowels (2005, 2x 16mm). Letterforms printed onto strips of film that would also produce the soundtrack. Vowels is expanded to Vowels and Consonants in collaboration with Guy Sherwin. Her most recent work is a 4x 16mm projection performance piece, End Rolls (2009, 4x 16mm). Since 2005, she has been assisting and collaborating with Sherwin in numerous film performances and projects.
www.dewfields.co.uk

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Sunday 9 September. 3pm
The Hackney Film Festival and IdeasTap present
An Emerging Filmmakers Screening (15) 60m
Hackney Picturehouse (Free Entry)

Hackney Film Festival and IdeasTap present the Emerging Filmmakers Screening at the Hackney Picturehouse. This free mid afternoon short film showcase will focus largely on young up and coming film makers to inspire and connect the next generation of filmmaking talent from the borough. Filmmaking masterclasses will be awarded by SAE institute to the crew of the top three films.

Skip Town
(Hackney Central 2012) dir. Rosanna Wan 3m
A day in the life of an adolescent boy trying to leave the suburban town of Skip. It explores themes of turning points in life, from puberty to death, and control and acceptance over these transitional moments.

As I got Older
(Hoxton 2012) Andrew Hill & Richard Chua 9m
A short documentary, Directed with Andrew Hill & Richard Chua. A mini biography of ex-gang member Jaye O'Leary with a inspirational story and a powerful message.

Night Cycle
(Clapton 2012) dir. Paul Frankl 5m
In the secluded bubble of a dated laundrette, away from busy London hustle, the young and mournful Lois finds refuge alone. Reflecting on the painful past she has lost, she gets lost in her thoughts until the mysterious and elusive Anna surprises her, appearing from nowhere to ply Lois from her thoughts and give her new hope.

Gentrification
(Haggerston 2012) dir. Alastair aloo 2m
In light of the recent Olympics being held in east London and the regeneration of the surrounding boroughs. Gentrification takes a personal and abstract look at those involved. A visual journey through social housing, capitalism, the environment and social unrest and asks local residents of their personal feelings about the Olympic games.

Alexis: Blurred Lines
(Haggerston 2012) dir. Amelia Abraham 12m
A documentary short about 24 year old Alexis' personal journey to undergo facial feminization surgery. We follow Alexis in her every day routine, take a trip with her to Belgium where she undergoes her surgery, and most importantly, ask her to discuss experiences as a transgender person.

Stalemate
(Hackney Downs 2012) dir Kasper Zak 13m
Older couple lives in a messy-labirynth of a house where just like their relationship, none of the objects works properly. The gramophone with a tango record especially, turning itself on and off whenever it wants to. Being completely different and ill-matched charecters they are busy getting on with their own contradicting activities, and do their best to not notice each other, Husband and Wife in turns engage themselves and all their possesions in the fight for territory, like in a game of chess. Until their paths collide.

Forget Me Not
(Cazenove 2010) dir. Lottie Kingslake 5m
A theatrical flower seller tells the story of a memory-less mountain man as part of an elaborate sales pitch.

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Sunday 9 September. 7pm
Andrew Kötting & Iain Sinclair present
A Hackney Wick canal screening:
Swandown & Short films (12A)
Carlton London (Fee Entry)

Sunday evening closes the festival with a free screening of Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair's olympic sized travelogue 'Swandown', plus a screening of Kötting's early short films and others. The event fittingly takes place at the Carlton London, situated on the canal in Hackney Wick, overlooking the closing ceremony of the Paralympics. Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair will also be in attendance for a Q&A hosted by Gareth Evans. This event is part of Showtime presented by the Mayor of London.

Hackney Armada (dir Larraine Worpole) 6 mins
Jaunt (dir. Andrew Kötting) 6 mins
Glitter and Storm (dir. Rebecca E Marshall) 15 mins
Gallivant Pilot (dir. Andrew Kötting) 8 mins
Edgeland Mutter (dir. Andrew Kötting) 4 mins
Offshore (dir. Andrew Kötting) 20 mins

Swandown 94 mins (plus Q&A with Andrew Kötting & Iain Sinclair)

more info..

The Hackney Armada / Larraine Worpole / 2012 / 6 mins
In early 1995 Larraine Worpole took a series of photographic details of boats under repair at the Springfield Marina on the River Lea in Hackney, where she had a mooring.  These enigmatic images appeared to form imaginary worlds, a sequence of which has been edited to create a journey to the heart of the river. The soundtrack has been composed by musician Dave Draper, from live sounds
recorded in the Lea Valley, digitally re-sampled, sequenced & mixed in the studio.

Photographer Larraine Worpole has lived in Hackney for more than forty years. Her work has been published in many books and journals on architecture and landscape, and is represented by the Edifice Photo Agency.

Guitarist Dave Draper's back catalogue includes leading The Ivory Coasters in the 1980s and recording as The Invisible String Quartet in the 1990s. He plays guitar, electronics & keyboards, and his musical interests range from rock & jazz to African pop music and free improvisation, using guitar & live multitrack looping, as well as sampled everyday sounds.


Jaunt / 1995 / 6mins
A trip up the Thames from Southend-On-Sea to the Houses of Parliament provides Kötting with many fine opportunities to indulge in his own idiosyncratic brand of taradiddles and horseplay, vivacious Super 8 camerawork and cast of cheeky characters.
Glitter and Storm / Rebecca E Marshall / 2012 / 15mins
Water, sunlight, breathing and skin – this is a submersion into the joy of sea swimming by night and by day. A series of moving portraits and interviews held exclusively in the sea off the coast of Hastings.

Rebecca E Marshall is a filmmaker and artist. Her work has been shown at the NFT, The Royal Opera House and film festivals worldwide. (www.rebeccaemarshall.com)


Gallivant Pilot / 1994 / 8 mins
A kind of pitch document for Kötting’s most celebrated feature – a coastal circumnavigation of the British Isles accompanied by his grandmother Gladys and daughter Eden.


Edgeland Mutter / 2009 / 4 mins
Edgeland Mutter attempts to invoke a sense of the past via the here-and-now. Drawing on my own extensive Super 8 archive and a growing body of Mini DV footage the film attempts to portray a fragmented and nostalgic view of a part of the world that has proved vital to the very fabric of my existence. Amongst the sonic flotsam and jetsam lie littoral truths, half-truths and coastal myths. Both melancholic and absurd the ‘coastcard’ is a confusing missive from a place of hope. It is a reminisce and flawed celebration. Hastings as a place where both memories and people are pulled towards the sea in a strange state of ‘reverse evolution’. Sinclair.


Offshore / 2007 / 20 mins
10 years ago Kötting made a film called Gallivant that took as its inspiration the coastline of Great Britain. This film takes as its inspiration a Channel light vessel called Gallivant. It travelled alongside him as he attempted to swim the English Channel as part of a family relay team. Sounds and images from the original film invade as both mnemonic and catalyst, littering it like the flotsam and jetsam that they swim through to get to the other side. He was assisted in this endeavour by the words of Iain Sinclair and the presence of his daughter Eden.


Swandown / 2012 / 94 mins
Swandown is a travelogue and odyssey of Olympian ambition; a poetic film-diary about encounter, myth and culture. It is also an endurance test and pedal-marathon in which Andrew Kötting (the filmmaker) and Iain Sinclair (the writer) pedal a swan-shaped pedalo from the seaside in Hastings to Hackney in London, via the English inland waterways. With a nod to Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and a pinch of Dada, Swandowndocuments their epic journey, on which they are joined by invited guests including comedian Stewart Lee, writer Alan Moore and actor Dudley Sutton.


Reviews:

It’s a calm, resigned, mystical work that sits back and lets the world work its strange magic on us. Sinclair talks of him and Kötting becoming ‘flesh radios’ as they navigate the waterways and tune into the frequency of people and places. In spirit, however, this is resolutely more Resonance FM than Radio 1. **** Time Out

There’s something enjoyably Herzogian about the pair’s trip: the way Kötting and Sinclair wrestle their craft, nicknamed Edith, over muddy embankments and bicker as they splosh along loamy waterways makes Swandown feel like Fitzcarraldo on aYou’ve Been Framed budget […] Swandown’s charm is rooted in something much deeper, and more profoundly English, than confected Team GB spirit. **** The Daily Telegraph

Swandown is utterly funny, deeply lyrical, wholly winning, unchallengeably unique. It converts Kötting at a stroke from an acquired taste to a required one. ***** The Financial Times


Notes on Andrew Kötting
By Gareth Evans

Andrew Kötting is one of Britain's most intriguing artists, and perhaps the only film-maker currently practising who could be said to have taken to heart the spirit of visionary curiosity and hybrid creativity exemplified by the late Derek Jarman. Formally exploratory and aesthetically innovative, like Jarman he is also a great collaborator, building around his various projects a community of shared interest, anchoring his prolific production in an ongoing report on the lives of those closest to him.

His thirty year oeuvre to date has moved from early live-art inflected, often absurdist pieces, ripe with their own internal logics and skewed mythologies, through darkly comic shorts, teasing out the melancholy surrealism at the heart of contemporary Englishness. His two resolutely independent features take landscape (rare among contemporary artists, he is most engaged beyond the urban) and journeys as the springboards for visually striking and structurally inventive enquiries into identity, belonging, history and notions of community.

But the film and video work offers just one incarnation of the themes and motifs to which Kötting is attentive. Throughout his work he has also written and performed, created for digital platforms and for the gallery (two- or three-dimensional pieces and installations) and is increasingly working directly with sound and music, in concert and on cd. Such activity reflects both his wide-ranging formal interests but also his refusal to adopt conventional ideas of closure around artworks in any medium. Ideas and images frequently migrate between media, being echoed and amplified in these translations. It is this openness, underpinned by an outlaw intelligence and pranksterish wit, which marks out his work as both energising and important.

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www.hackneyfilmfestival.com