Adam Kossoff

An adolescent girl, sexually abused as a child by her father, runs away from home.

On the eve of World War II, did Humphrey Jennings make a film about the 1937 Paris Exposition? Walter Benjamin seems to think so. Jennings, British filmmaker and Surrealist, and Benjamin, Marxist philosopher, were both in Paris in 1937, although their paths didn’t cross. But, some years later, they both meet on a perch on the sky. As Jennings and Benjamin watch the film of the Paris Exposition go by in slow motion their conversation is jousting and gossiping, exposing differences between British and European positions. Focused on their two great unfinished works, Jennings’s Pandaemonium and Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, they discuss Modernism, Surrealism, progress, history, technology, capitalism as spectacle, and the consequences of a divided Europe.’

Upside down stop-frame images follow a path through Epping Forest on the edge of East London, revealing the beauty of a topsy-turvy forest.

We follow the constantly shifting Thames downstream, in all its infinite richness, acknowledging how human intervention has shaped it, but also how the river continues to influence the lives of those who live around it, from source to mouth.

30 years from the formation of Solidarity, 20 years from the introduction of democracy in Poland, there is widespread concern that the Gdansk Shipyard will be irrevocably destroyed through urban re-development. Using fragments of archive film from the popular struggle in the Poland, together with footage of the current destruction of the Gdansk Shipyard, Not Our Darkness is a poetic exploration of how memory, time and place interweave to form ‘image-constellations’; and how urban re-development threatens to obliterate the traces of past struggles.