Charlie Jimenez
Directing
Biography
Charlie Jimenez is a London and Dorchester-based filmmaker/artist known for their surreal and dreamy moving-image and performance art. Charlie creates visions which are both personal and mythological, which explore the relation between between body and memory evoking the otherworldly and liminal in the merging between imagined and real. Their films focus on the transformation in the flux of decay and mutation. Charlie gained notoriety in London's underground queer art scene, creating live tableaus which synthesise butoh and live installation into haunting tableus which meditate on memory and ephemerality. Charlie's films have been featured across the world. Their student short film Keratin winning ‘Best Short Film’ at ASVOFF 2024. Their work has been featured in publications including: Dazed, Kaltblut, ShowStudio, and NastyMagazine. Charlie has also collaborated with artists like FKA Twigs (for her Eusexua concert), HMLTD, and Jockstrap.
Known For
Following a strange encounter with a swan found on the streets of London, a girl begins to lose her grip on reality. She is led to a large house where the lines between dreams and memories become indistinguishable, as she struggles with her relationships, her obsession with perfection and her identity. Loosely inspired by the mythology of Leda and The Swan, it looks at the way women cope with trauma, questions the idea of self and takes you on a journey through one woman's psyche.
One White Feather
A space occupies it, awaiting to be unlocked by a freeing action or notion. What lies ahead is its determination.
A Fugue
A spiral of dreams and ages unravel as two celestial characters awaken and transmutate into a mythological being.
Transmutation
Keratin is a collaboration with the London Sinfionetta, visually responding to Gavin Higgins' Seven Welsh Folk Songs: I. Dacw 'Nghariad i. The film tells the journey of a mating of elements, two bodies grieve over a lost third: a child separated from their womb. The three bodies bound by their keratin, regain connection in a wombic journey which spiritually networks the three into a fused collective body.
Keratin
After a feverish dream, a paralysed woman finds herself trapped within a purgatory of sleep, as their inaction causes time to move. The dreamers' body mutates and deforms as multiple incarnations of herself struggle to awake. Bed & Breakfast is a surrealist horror about inaction and sleep paralysis. Questioning the nature of memory, identity, and the fabric of reality, by plunging you into the psyche of a paralysed dreamer where reality is far repressed.
Bed & Breakfast
Confined to an endlessly burning waiting room, a dying sedentary woman experiences herself blurring in and out of her body. In her last remaining fragments she tries to make amends with her spirit before her remaining fragments either decay or create.
Candle
unknit the ghost is a live show exploring addiction and cycles of trauma. The show combines live performers choreographed by Charlie Jimenez with projections by video artist Autojektor. Staged at PORTAL 002 - plantroom, Smeed Road, London - April 12th, 2025.
Unknit the Ghost
In an abandoned underworld, a drained swimming pool becomes the well of creation, where scarred ancient figures give birth to light and desire. At its centre is Phanes, the androgynous god of light and creation, reimagined as a wounded, intersex angel reborn from a flood of flames.
Engines
A live performance by Charlie Jimenez & Sioul Blaphate hosted as a pre-show to Rebel Reel CineClub's 'A Most Unholy Christmas' - a screening of Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain (1973) at Rio Cinema, 17th December, 2024. The performance is a live-theatre and dance piece loosely inspired by Jodorowsky's film and its influenced source Mount Analogue. Through dance, masks, and live-theatre, Mount Analogue navigates a procession of ascension through transforming bodies and shapes. A primordial place of transformation, magic, and symbols.
Mount Analogue
A sleep paralyzed woman confronts her demons.