The Goethe-Institut London, together with Club des Femmes and in cooperation with the ICA, presents a selection of films directed by Elfi Mikesch. Best known for her work as a cinematographer with Rosa von Praunheim, Monika Treut, Friederike Pezold, Heinz Emigholz, Cynthia Beatt, and Teresa Villaverde, Mikesch has also developed a uniquely genre-blending body of work as a director, which has had a significant influence on feminist and queer cinema.

We’re thrilled to celebrate the release of a long-awaited Blu-ray collection and to spend the evening immersed in the fiercely tactile, deeply personal cinema of Jennifer Reeves!

Underneath the Floorboards presents its 15th edition, a programme that brings together a wide range of experimental moving-image practices by artists from diverse contexts and generations. Through intimate narratives, poetic gestures, political reflection, and formal experimentation, this selection unfolds as a journey across fragile states of being, memory, displacement, vulnerability, and transformation.

An expanded cinema epic, Jennifer Reeves’s When It Was Blue consists of two 16mm reels projected by the artist atop one another on a single screen, each unfurling a contrapuntal stream of images captured from the landscapes of the Americas, Iceland, and New Zealand. Always on the move, Reeves’s film flits through an ever-changing world of sun-struck treetops, billowing hills, collapsing glaciers, and efflorescent lava, with fleeting portraits of owls, seafowl, snakes, and the occasional human.