10th Nov 2021, Prince Charles Cinema. Screening as part of Japan 2020: Over 100 years of Japanese Cinema, a UK-wide film season supported by National Lottery and BFI Film Audience Network.

Made by the acclaimed director of Love Letter and April Story, Shunji Iwai’’s All About Lily Chou-Chou is told through the eyes of Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara), an eighth-grader obsessed with the ethereal J-Pop idol Lily Chou-Chou, a character inspired by Canto-pop artist and actress Faye Wong and compared often to Bjork. Creating a fan-site through which a loyal coterie of ‘Lilyphiles’ trade gossip, information, and speculation, Yuichi takes increasing solace in this fictional world, using the strength of the community to overcome his crippling shyness and the harsh realities of the outside world, before meeting up with other devotees for real at a mega-concert. All About Lily Chou-Chou began life first as a uncompleted novel before transforming into an interactive text maintained by Iwai on the lily-holic.com website and the interactive development of the project was crucial, enhancing the parallel narratives at play in a project that expands beyond the screen and blurs boundaries between the real and the imaginary. Incorporating a hyperreal display of early digital video and an extraordinary use of rapturous music, All About Lily Chou-Chou offers sensory pleasure in abundance, whilst still intelligently addressing prescient themes of violence, bullying, and alienated adolescence, creating a vivid portrait of the disaffected Japanese youth that remains current and resonant long past its post-millennial context due to its innovative, formal experimentation and its ahead-of-its-time vision of the explosive, sometimes frightening power of online communities. 

All About Lily Chou-Chou (Shunji Iwai | 2001 | Japan | 147’ )

Preceded by a video introduction by Joanne McNeil, author of Lurking.

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3rd April 2019, BFI Southbank. Presented as part of ‘Born Digital: Raised by the Internet’

Machinima - a portmanteau of ‘machine’ and ‘cinema’ - is the process of using real-time computer graphics engines to create a cinematic production. Though few use the term, artists have been experimenting with this mode for almost as long as videogames have existed. Across a series of short films featuring various videogame environments, this programme proposes that whilst games can be art, art can also be games.

Counter-Charge (Alex Hovet | 2016 | USA | 13’)
She Puppet (Peggy Ahwesh | 2001 | USA | 15’)
^6[#M2d,i{Pa (? | ? | ? | 2’)
Swatted (Ismaël Joffroy-Chandoutis | 2018 | France | 21’)
RECKONING 4 (Kent Lambert | 2016 | USA | 10’)
*>/}Fhq4qspU (? | ? | ? | 2’)
Post-Newtonianism (Josh Bricker | 2012 | USA | 6’)
Modern Warfare (Claire L. Evans | 2010 | USA | 5’)
J%mM=B%&U)&2 (? | ? | ? | 2’)
Self Destruction for Eternity (Wei Ming Ho | 2011 | Taiwan | 6’)

+ San Andreas Deer Cam (Brent Watanabe | 2015-2016 | USA | ?)

Preceded by lightning talks from Holly Nielsen and Arron Santry.

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24th February 2019, Close-Up Cinema. Presented with Kinet Media.

“Love has no end—a story always has. You will now see: a lovestory.”

“A young man leaves his village to audition for a dance company in town. He starts getting involved in illegal activities. He goes to bed with men for money. He falls in love with a man. He starts performing with a dance company.” So begins Georgian filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze’s first feature ​Let The Summer Never Come Again, ​and before long what may seem first like a fairly straightforward film proves itself to be a source of frequent wonders. Filmed entirely on ​a Sony Ericsson W595 yet offering no shortage of visual splendour, it is a work of consistent ingenuity and continual surprise, an experimental, three-hour-plus piece of pixel-impressionism that references cinema’s silent era whilst forging forward with the creation of its own language. Roads wind, the city glimmers, trees tremble in the wind, and cats, dogs and people come and pass by Koberidze’s camera, life unravelling in a series of bold gestures and broad brushstrokes.​ ​A prize winner at FIDMarseille and Berlinale, Koberidze’s film is many things: a classical romance, a city symphony, and a road movie rolled into one.

Let The Summer Never Come Again will be preceded by five minutes of short film ‘love streams’ made by filmmakers affiliated with Kinet Media. Kinet is a virtual studio dedicated to the production and dissemination of new and boundary pushing avant-garde cinema.

Late Embryo + Rained Last Night (Kelley Dong | 2017 | USA | 1’)
Redshift (Isaac Goes | 2019 | USA | 1’)
Go-Stop (Miguel Mantecon | 2018 | USA | 1’)
face time audio (Isiah Medina | 2018 | Canada | 1’)
_feb18 (Dylan Tachick | 2018 | USA | 1’)
4z (Michelle Yoon | 2019 | USA | 1’)
Let The Summer Never Come Again (Alexandre Koberidze | 2017 | Georgia, Germany | 202’)

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15th September 2018, the Goethe Institut, South Kensington. Presented with Patrick Holzapfel, Maren Hobein and Goethe Institut, as part of ‘Always Somewhere Else - The Cinema of Angela Schanelec in Dialogue.’

“It’s gonna be you,
And me.
It’s gonna be everything you’ve ever dreamed.
It’s gonna be who,
And me.
It’s gonna be everything and everything, we’re meant to be.”

In Helena Wittmann’s DRIFT, two women talk, leisurely and loosely, before one of them sets off for the other side of the planet - slowly but surely stepping off land and into the sea. A distance is drawn; an ocean lies between them. Sensually and synesthetically, a journey is charted, the camera moving with the moods of its characters, sensations plotted with a sensitivity that softens the stoic structure holding it all together. The Dreamed Path — made a year before by a tutor of Wittman’s, the inimitable Angela Schanelec — shares a similar sense of motion, charting another relationship that takes place across a great distance. Sharp and yet also fluid, distant but designed - these are hypnotic, emotive films that lull with their rigour and rhythm, all the while remaining guided by a intuitive visual logic, an unconscious force unto its own. Slipping out to the tranquil terrains of the subconscious and transporting the senses with them, the films (and their viewers) eventually return, alert and anew - a sense of serenity, and of the sublime, irrevocably imbued.

The Dreamed Path (Angela Schanelec | 2016 | Germany | 86’)
DRIFT (Helena Wittmann | 2017 | Germany | 97’)

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19th June 2018, Genesis Cinema, Whitechapel. Presented with Ben Nicholson

“As a major storm strikes Texas in September 1900,
a new and mysterious televisual device is built and tested…”

A series of 3D films from Toronto based critic, educator and filmmaker Blake Williams that build upon his research into the history of the use of stereoscopic technologies in the avant-garde. Satisfying, sensorial experiments, these extra-dimensional and extra-terrestrial films push the possibilities of the image into strange and alluring new directions.

Red Capriccio (Blake Williams | 2014 | Canada | 7’)
Something Horizontal (Blake Williams | 2015 | Canada | 10’)
PROTOTYPE (Blake Williams | 2017 | Canada | 63’)

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9th September 2017, The Castle Cinema, Hackney. Presented with Open City Documentary Festival

“As you look at the screen, it is possible to believe you are gazing into eternity. You see the things that were inside you. This is the womb, the original site of the imagination. You do not move your eyes from the screen, you have become invisible.”

A series of recent artists’ moving image works exploring the internet, digital technologies, virtual realities and other forms of networked existence. Together these short films open a window into outer realms of the digital present, ruminate on our connected past, or speculate towards unknown futures.

Still Life (Beta Male) (Jon Rafman | 2013 | Canada | 5’)
Colossal Cave (Graeme Arnfield | 2016 | UK | 11’)
Wherever You Go, There We Are (Jesse McLean | 2017 | USA | 12’)
All That Is Solid (Louis Henderson | 2014 | France/UK | 16’)
SELACHIMORPHA (Joey Holder | 2017 | UK | 5’)
(∃u) [u ≤ f and u ≤ m] (Isiah Medina | 2014 | Canada | 1’)
whoiswatchingiam (Ciaran McWilliams | 2016 | UK | 3’)
t a r d i g r a d e (Eduardo Makoszay | 2016 | Mexico | 6’)
I (FRAME) (Karissa Hahn & Andrew Kim | 2016 | USA | 11’)
Disobedient Children (Dorine van Meel | 2016 | Netherlands | 17’)
20160815 (Tina Frank | 2016 | Austria | 3’)

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