Andrea Luka Zimmerman

A child is drawn to the stillness of nature beyond a city. A teenager, rising from sleep in a thicket, makes their way back to a trailer: to warmth, a caretaker, a dog. But the thudding on hard concrete from the highway above is no comfort. A tree envelopes a fence with its growth – grasses sprout through cracked and decaying industry. The individual is searching, pushing forward through landscapes and time. Adulthood leads into the forest.

A cine-poem, taking as a starting point Martin Luther King's 1967 speech, given on receipt of his honorary doctorate from the University of Newcastle, and visiting key locations in the city's history of civil resistance.

Art Class (2020, 49 mins) is a filmed performance lecture playing on, and exploring, the perennial tension between the two key words in its title. It uses the tropes of scholarly presentation and personal confession alongside extracts from the artist’s work, guest interventions, martial arts and meditation exercises and evidentiary found material. The film tests the limits of access that working-class artists have to cultural production and to the relevant institutions circulating these outcomes. Alternately playful and provocative, serious and satirical, Art Class favors wit over weaponizing and reflection over rhetoric but does not pull its punches when it comes to the real obstructions to working class creative progress, or to the strategies necessary to overcome such outmoded hindrances.

Three attempts at reconnecting with often traumatic pasts, all leading to flights from home and the need for personal reinvention. A documentary triptych of many layers and emotions, whose parts connect with each other in unexpected ways.

Taşkafa is a real dog and also a legend on the streets of Istanbul. John Berger begins Taşkafa’s story, reading from his novel, King, the story of the disappearance of a community told from a dog’s perspective. The area’s ordinary people – taxi drivers, shopkeepers, street traders – care deeply about the welfare of the city’s street dogs and they tell us stories about Taşkafa and their other canine neighbours. The animals are a symbol of community living, where people (and dogs) look out for each other, but this is a community in transition; one from which dogs are starting to be expelled. Eccentric, amusing and very warm, the film is a powerful indictment of the impact of global politics and the economic appropriation of public space but, even more, it is a tribute to both the spirit of resistance and to city life that can accommodate people and dogs together.

Filmed in parks and markets within and beyond Tbilisi, and also in the ancient hermetic cave networks of Davit Gareja on the desert border with Azerbaijan, Birdboy and the General unfolds within a specifically Georgian reality to tell a larger story of place and purpose, control and change, aspiration and refusal. Given life by the evocative creations of Abkhazian puppeteer Denis Gonobolin, it speaks to forms of belonging rooted and realised in imagination, and looks to celebrate the potency of play, something slightly absurd, a skewed juxtaposition and leap of faith, to redirect the course of events, whether personal or public.

Fairy tales are handed down from mothers to daughters, and from fathers to sons. As they are passed on, the tales grow in the telling – or gradually depart from the original, as new elements get added, or others get cut.

Ten Londoners and a dog. They dance together, steal together, eat together; agree and disagree, celebrate their differences and share their talents. They spark a debate about the world we live in, who has stolen what from whom, and how things might be fixed.

Taking as a starting point Phlocus’ poem ‘In The Monster’s Mouth’, written during his time living in a public park, three screens explore the notion of public space, who has access to it, and what it means to be ‘in public’.

'Bo' Gritz is one of America's highest decorated Vietnam veterans and the real life inspiration behind Rambo. He also killed 400 people, turned against Washington and moved to the Nevada desert where he now sleeps with many weapons. Filmed over ten years using impressive visual material, Zimmerman's portrait of Bo embodies contemporary American society in all its dizzying complexity and contradictions.

A cinematic diary from the West Bank and the Golan Heights – places caught between occupation, oppression, and a lived, collective experience.

This deeply exploratory work is drawn exclusively from the eclectic personal and public archive, in multiple formats, of Andrea’s life until their lasting estrangement from both parents, aged 30.

Andrew Kötting's film retraces John Clare's journey from Epping Forest to Northamptonshire accompanied by a straw bear.

Alluding to one of Schwitters' lesser-known faces, as the author of playfully absurdist children's tales, Andrea Luka Zimmerman's Merzschmerz is a series of short recordings of young children reciting these stories from memory.

Between dream and nightmare, The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow is a traversal of here and elsewhere, first and third world; a fairytale of production, resources, capitalism, globalisation , refuse and refusal: The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow is a film not about the struggle to be seen, but about the struggle to see.

Filmed by Indonesian workers during their working hours on rubber and palm oil plantations, this film exposes the devastating role of militarism and repression in building the “global economy.” Through chilling first hand accounts, hilarious improvised interventions, collective debate, and archival footage, the film explores the relationships between trade, Third World debt, and international institutions like the IMF and World Bank.

Fairy tales are handed down from mothers to daughters, and from fathers to sons. As they are passed on, the tales grow in the telling – or gradually depart from the original, as new elements get added, or others get cut.

A romantic essay on a modern Icarus and his metal flying angel. Some call it freedom, some call it flying saucers, some call it insane, some call it living, some are seen dying, some call it flying, some call it heaven, some call it hell.

Examines the resilience of residents who are profoundly overlooked by media representations and wider social responses. Interweaving intimate portraits with the residents' own historical re-enactments, landscape and architectural studies and dramatised scenes, the film asks how we might resist being framed exclusively through class, gender, ability or disability, and even through geography.

2016 marks the 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia. His pioneering account of an ideal society (the original meaning of the word utopia being both no-lace and good-place) set the template for numerous literary, artistic and filmic speculations in the centuries since about the best way to imagine and order the perfect society. Its impact is immeasurable, and while the counter point, dystopia, is perhaps more familiar to our troubled times, the book’s call to imagine a better possible future has never been more relevant or necessary. My version of Utopia speaks with the voices of primary school children imagining their own Utopia. A lesson to us about the world we made for them.