Chiemi Shimada

World-famous and already notorious Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein spent 1931 in Mexico, after the rejection of his projects in Hollywood. But the epic film he planned and largely shot would never be completed. In 2012, film historian Ian Christie visited the hacienda where Eisenstein spent much of his time in Mexico, to ask what really went on there, and discover what’s happened since. This essay film, made in partnership with Japanese filmmaker Chiemi Shimada, looks beyond the apparent failure, to ask what contemporary audiences – and Eisenstein himself – could still learn from Que Viva Mexico!

In extreme cold, the human body can turn against itself through paradoxical undressing: failing nerves mistake freezing for heat, compelling the dying to shed their last protection. In 水托邦 (Hydrotopia), hydrophones frozen into a block of ice capture the material disintegration of their frozen body as a projected film gradually emerges into clarity.

Shortly before Christmas 1973, the crew of Skylab, NASA’s first space station, went on strike.

mmm is an eclectic collection of the clouds captured in Japanese cinema from the 1920s to the present. Drawing inspiration from the 35mm film materials of Japanese physicist and cloud expert Masanao Abe (1891–1966) and scientist Tapio Schneider’s apprehension of a future with cloudless skies, mmm looks at formlessness as an essential actor in the history of cinema.

Inspired by Frances Glessner Lee’s Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death - a series of dioramas created to improve crime scene investigation, Fragments explores the act of observation through a 40s crime scene diorama.

Chiyo is a poetic exploration of the suburbs in Japan through the filmmaker’s reflection on the life of her grandmother. With a series of everyday moments in Yashio from a summer fair to Buddhist rituals, the film embodies micro-narratives, seeking cinema’s ability to offer a contemplative space.

Austin is a journey through a young man’s private landscape. He does not appear on screen but through his soundscapes leading the audience through his home, exploring the space of his domesticity. The work is inspired by the artist's bereaved brother. She created a character based on her brother, replacing the scene from Japan to the UK, and created the work by looking at the traces of human presence through the still life, recalling the space of the house where he spent his last hours.

An intimate, filmic love letter to the filmmaker’s quasi-grandmother.

Picturesque activities gather those with a sinister secret: they are all afflicted by atypical sleep patterns. In participatory workshops held across the UK and Japan, patients and doctors partake in tactile, ludic gatherings, while opening up about the vulnerability and mercurial nature of dreams and (lack of) slumber. Both a remedial, practice-based project and a film, Oneiric Kitchen ushers a private nocturnal problem into a communal forum of open discussion and soothing reflection.

Made as a pilot film of Chiyo, At Altitude is a self-reflexive film of a filmmaker’s brief visit to her grandmother in the Japanese suburbs. Not having seen her grandmother for a while, as the filmmaker has been living abroad for the past 5 years, she uses a 16mm film camera as a mediation tool to reconnect with her grandmother. Interweaving the juxtaposition of inside and outside spaces, the film offers an intimate look at family life and ageing.