Curated by Matt Feldman and Syd Farrington, In Our Sleep brings together the work of 8 artists for a screening of films presented on 16mm. The films offer a unique approach to 16mm filmmaking in their consideration of landscape, domestic space and media as a means of addressing notions of ‘Place’. Through reflections on light, magic, death and dreams, each film considers the importance of what remains unseen and beyond the surface of image.
Programme:
- Osmose (Laurence Favre, 2022, 11 min, 16mm)
A sensory exploration of the forest and the tensions that inhabit it, Osmose interweaves images of pure chlorophyll and the dense blackness of burnt forests. The dynamics of these cycles of life and death imprinted pictorially on 16mm film are amplified by a soundtrack articulating sensations of anxiety and appeasement.
- Colour Poems (Margaret Tait, 1974, 13 min, 16mm)
“Nine linked short films. Memory, chance observation, and the subsuming of one in the other. The titles within the film are: Numen of the Boughs, Old Boots, Speed Bonny Boat, Lapping Water, Incense, Aha, Brave New World, Things, Terra Firma. A poem started in words is continued by the picture, part of another poem is read for the last of the nine. Some images are formed by direct-on film animation, others are found by the camera.” – M.T.
- The Girl Who Is (Sara Sowell, 2021, 6 min, 16mm)
I’m not like other girls
People say that
But for me
It’s true because
I don’t have a body
I’m just one element
Of the psyche
Conjuring Freud's id while watching America's Next Top Model.
- The Magician’s House (Deborah Stratman, 2007, 5 min 45 sec, 16mm)
Sometimes the supernatural lingers plainly in the most ordinary places, secret only in so much as its trace goes unnoticed. Both a letter to a cancer-stricken alchemist-filmmaker friend, and a quiet tribute to the vanishing art of celluloid, The Magician’s House is full of ghosts. Including that of Athanasius Kircher, inventor of the Magic Lantern or “Sorcerer’s Lamp”. The music, “La lutte des Mages” (The Struggle of the Magicians) was composed by Armenian mystic Georges Gurdjieff and Thomas De Hartmann. Gurdjieff thought man was a “transmitting station of forces.” To him, most people move around in a state of waking sleep, so he sought to provide aural conditions that would induce awareness.
- In Our Sleep (Syd Farrington, 2023, 4’40 min, 16mm)
The notion a full moons presence effects dreams and the subconscious, the landscape of a romanticised English countryside is contrasted with that of inner-city London.
- Las Animas (Matt Feldman, 2025, 14 min, 16mm)
A haunted drift through the scarred coalfields of Las Animas County in southeastern Colorado, where wilderness now veils the remnants of violent labour struggle. Smouldering beneath the earth, century-old coal fires echo the unresolved trauma of the Coalfield War and Ludlow Massacre. Layering history, landscape, and slow-burning myth, this elegy conjures ghosts from soot and silence.
- Daisies Cloud Passing (Peter Todd, 2019, 30 sec, 16mm)
“Daisies Cloud Passing. A short film that is gone in an instant – a sunny spot of grass is darkened as a cloud presumably passes overhead. Like a Dickinson poem, its simplicity startles, then cuts to the bone.” – Sarah Neely
- Everything Comes Full Circle (Lilan Yang, 2023, 14 min, 16mm)
"Following Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984) filming locations from Houston, Texas to Los Angeles, California, I use a 16mm Bolex camera to capture the vastness of the American West. The footage draws me to reminisce about snippets of my everyday life. I contemplate how we perceive the world through analogue optical apparatuses and how memories are multidimensional yet fragile. Our recollections of people and places can be distorted, unrecognisable, and fictitious. These memories would eventually diminish with the passing of time. Everything Comes Full Circle is a personal attempt to remember things that will soon be forgotten." – LY