A vision of Utopia, scrapbook

:: the moving image section of News from Nowhere ::

Saturday 10th, Sunday 11th, 2pm - Saturday 17th, Sunday 18th - 2pm and 6pm

Roberto Battista
The science of delusion
9.30 min

Delusions and illusions of the post WWII world, when happiness could be marketed, science could be worshipped and philosophies could be exchanged in a world that could only get better.

Sequence of collage images (pre-computer era) from a scenic projection work made in 1988 using archive material from the 50s and 60s

Soundtrack made with excerpts from Irdial’s Conet Project - shortwave radio recordings of “number stations” transmitting intelligence agencies’ secret coded messages from the cold war era.

Gianluca Bonomo
Seed
8.48min

Gianluca Bonomo - director
Sarah Dowling - choreographer

Dance and drama experimental short film

Set in an abstract and dark environment this film presents a minimalist, almost surreal space in which a mother and her son engage in a stylised performance highlighting dramaic aspects of their peculiar relationship.

Music composed by Davide Mantovani and performed by
Samy Bishai, violin and viola and Francine Loze, cello.

Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen
'No Place Like Home’
28 min

Shot on 16mm film and Super-8 film converted to digital video explores the enormous areas of land outside major U.A.E. cities where desert is being cultivated into urban environments. For weeks I travelled in the interim between fully developed cityscapes and untouched desert with cinematographer Jonas Mortensen.

'No Place Like Home’ has a sound-score specially composed by Mikkel H. Eriksen

Martina von Holn
Heliohappiness
5 min

In collaboration with composer and musician Pepe Sanchez I have created a short video which draws on the theme of Utopia as ‘an ideal commonwealth whose inhabitants exist under seemingly perfect conditions’: Heliohappiness throws a satirical yet haunting light on what conditions we could be confronted with in a time possibly not as long ahead of us as we would like it to be – leaving the viewer behind with a rather dystopian sensation of sweet bitterness

Hazuan Hashim and Phil Maxwell
East End l, East End ll and East End lll -
19 min

3 short video installations of sequences of stills and moving images of London East End shot during the past 25 years by photographer Phil Maxwell. With Michael Nyman's music (taken from his latest solo album, The Piano Sings) the three installations compliment each other are realised by Hazuan Hashim. They provide a narrative of a place which for centuries has been a refuge/utopia for people from all over the world, becoming a microcosm of global society..

Terry Smith
MAJD’S STORY
A WAR IN SLOW MOTION
8 min

An assault on ordinary life

The theme of both works is the occupation of Palestine, a place where the idea of utopia is absent, where time began, and god'

I am a visual artist, just returned from an arts workshop in Palestine. I thought I was aware of the situation, but I soon realised how little I knew relying on what I was getting through the traditional media.

When I arrived in Palestine I was intrigued to see the situation, by the time I left, three weeks later, I was changed. In the film Majd’s Story, she at one point turns to the audience and says " Maybe you can help us, you can talk to them " She also says "to be Palestinian is to have a broken Jaw" that they recognise the need to put their case to the rest of the world, sleep walking through this conflict.