aemi is delighted to partner with Film London to host the 2020 Jarman Award Touring Programme. Inspired by the experimental vision and output of Derek Jarman, over the years the Award has provided an unparalleled opportunity to many emerging filmmakers, some of whom we’ve had the privilege of working with here at aemi.
Recently the 2020 award ceremony was broadcast online and we would like to offer our utmost congratulations to the awardees Michelle Williams Gamaker, Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, Project Art Works, Jenn Nkiru, Larissa Sansour, and Andrea Luka Zimmerman. Disclosing latent environmental minutiae to monumental social movements, these six affecting films advocate for a more explorative philosophy to our shared experiences of co-existing.
The Jarman Award Touring Programme 2020 film info:
Michelle Williams Gamaker, House of Women (2017) 14’17”
Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, In my Room (2020) 17’44”
Project Art Works, Illuminating the Wilderness (2019), 38’
Jenn Nkiru, BLACK TO TECHNO (2019) 20’
Larissa Sansour, In Vitro (2019) 28’
Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Civil Rites (2017) 28’
Streaming begins at midnight Sunday 13 Dec and continues until midnight Tuesday 15 Dec
Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, In my Room (2020) 17’44”
Larissa Sansour, In Vitro (2019) 28’
Project Art Works, Illuminating the Wilderness (2019), 38’
Michelle Williams Gamaker, House of Women (2017) 14’17”
Jenn Nkiru, BLACK TO TECHNO (2019) 20’
Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Civil Rites (2017) 28’
Michelle Williams Gamaker, House of Women (2017) 14’17”
Part of Williams Gamaker’s Dissolution trilogy, House of Women revisits the audition for the character Kanchi, the Indian dancer in Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus. The role went to the white English actor Jean Simmons who wore a racist make-up technique. The film restages the audition with actors who come face to face with the violence of the process. Auditioning only Indian ex-pat or first-generation British Asian women and non-binary individuals, the film re-casts a Kanchi for the 21st Century.
Michelle Williams Gamaker works with moving image, performance and installation. Her practice is often in dialogue with film history, particularly Hollywood and British studio films. By restaging scenes to reveal their politically problematic, imperialist roots, her work enacts a form of ‘fictional activism’, which recasts characters originally played by white actors with people of colour. She combines scriptwriting, workshopping with actors, revisiting analogue VFX and producing props to create intricately staged films.
Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, In my Room (2020) 17’44”
In My Room is shot primarily in Birmingham’s gay village, once dominated by male-only-venues, now undergoing rapid gentrification. The film features a series of dance performances, and takes a critical look at male-only social and sex spaces. As the closure of gay venues exposes gay male culture to new challenges, the film is intended both as a provocation and a document of LGBTQ culture at a tumultuous Time.
Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings are an artist duo working in film, drawing, installation and performance. Their work examines the behaviours, history, politics and artefacts of LQBTQ culture in the western context, exploring how this culture is reflective of broader societal structures. Their collaborative practice uses film as part archive and research, and part cinematic experience with an expert use of sound, colour, and camerawork.
Project Art Works, Illuminating the Wilderness (2019) 38’
Illuminating the Wilderness is a collaborative project that follows neurodivergent artists and makers, and their families and support teams, investigating a Scottish glen. The film reveals the fluidity of roles and interactions between this unique and itinerant community away from the barriers they face in their everyday lives.
Project Art Works’ collaborations, projects, events and studio actions challenge societal definitions of care, creative intent, value, communication and identity. Their programmes evolve through studio practice and radiate out to the cultural and care sectors. Work is made visible through projects, collaborations, exhibitions, co-commissions, films, publications and digital platforms, increasing neurodiverse representation in programming, and deepening understanding and visibility. Personalised and holistic studio environments are recreated wherever a project takes place. The studio is a place of level hierarchy where events and happenings unfold revealing the lived experience and qualities of all those involved. Artists and makers work together in purposeful collaboration using total communication that utilises gesture, sound, signing and empathy and as such is an expansive rather than reductive form of connection.
Jenn Nkiru, BLACK TO TECHNO (2019), 20’
BLACK TO TECHNO follows the history of Techno music and asserts it not just as a musical gesture but as a philosophical, sonic and anthropological one: a model for the overcoming of alienation, the undoing of oppositions between the individual and the means of production. As Nkiru calls it, the film is a ‘cosmic archaeology’ which deeply explores and excavates the layers bound within this unique sound.
Jenn Nkiru is an artist and filmmaker. Pushed through an Afrosurrealist lens, her practice is grounded in the history of Black music and the aesthetics of experimental film and international art cinema. Her work draws on the Black arts movement and the rich and variegated tradition of cinemas of the Black diaspora and their distinct experimentation with the politics of form. Her work blends elements of history, identity, politics, music, documentary and dance.
Larissa Sansour, In Vitro (2019) 28’
In Vitro is a 2-channel black and white sci-fi film set in the aftermath of an eco-disaster. An abandoned nuclear reactor under Bethlehem has been converted into an enormous orchard. In the hospital wing of the underground compound, the orchard’s ailing founder, Dunia, is lying in her deathbed as 30-year-old Alia comes to visit her. The talk between the two soon evolves into an intimate dialogue about memory, exile and nostalgia.
Larissa Sansour works mainly with film, and also produces installations, photos and sculptures. Central to her work is the dialectics between myth and historical narrative. Born in East Jerusalem, Palestine, her recent work uses science fiction to address social and political issues.
Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Civil Rites (2017) 28’
Civil Rites is a cine-poem which takes Martin Luther King’s 1967 speech, given on receipt of his honorary doctorate from the University of Newcastle, as a starting point. It explores how the core themes of poverty, racism and war continue to haunt our lives. Newcastle residents offer their responses to these themes. Their voices act in dialogue with sites of resistance from across the Tyneside region. It seeks to learn what has changed (or not) in the lives of people in Newcastle today.
Andrea Luka Zimmerman is an artist, filmmaker and cultural activist whose engaged practice focuses on marginalised individuals, communities and experience. It employs imaginative hybridity and narrative re-framing, alongside reverie and informed waywardness. Creative approaches include longterm observation, intervention, re-enactment and the use of found / archive materials, grounded in an honouring of lived realities. Alert to sources of radical hope, this work prioritises an enduring and equitable co-existence.
