Film and Video Umbrella

Familiar Phantoms is an experimental documentary short film about memory, history and trauma.

Some time after a mysterious weather event caused a cloud of sand from a faraway desert to settle over an unnamed city, this miasma of dust shows no sign of lifting. Clogging up the eyes and choking off the horizon, it has become a fact of everyday life. In a nondescript apartment somewhere in the city, a woman convenes a gathering at which a group of young people are present. Like every young generation, they are a repository of hope for the future – albeit a future that seems equally murky and obscured.

Bodies of water are intervened upon, moved, disrupted and exploited. Labouring bodies experience similar pressures from the same forces of power and extraction. Distant communities – Northern England and Jamaica – share similar histories of manipulation and oppression whose record is kept in the living memory of its waterways. But water, like people, can find a way to exert its own will.

A documentary about trans woman rapper and producer htmljones (Ishaani Ponniah), framed through the visual language of early-2000s television, 2010s internet aesthetics, and contemporary British culture.

Heralded by the futuristic computer-generated cityscapes that have become a signature feature of his work, Lawrence Lek’s mini-opus Geomancer is less inclined to map the building blocks of the urban architecture of tomorrow than to try and summon up the spirit of our rapidly dawning age - one whose characteristics, Lek implies, include the growing ascendancy of the cultural phenomenon of Sino-Futurism. As the geopolitical axis tilts further to the East, and as once-dominant economic/technological models are cast into doubt, Lek alights on a longstanding tension between the place of the human and the role of the machine, sharpened by contemporary hopes and anxieties around the rise of East Asia, and by speculations that new forms of artificial intelligence, already outperforming mere mortals in matters of automation and aggregation, will challenge us in more creative skills as well. (fvu.co.uk)

Ted Hughes's 1993 novel The Iron Woman is the springboard for this multi-media project by Mikhail Karikis. The video section of the installation features seven-year-olds from Mayflower Primary School in East London discussing the novel's environmental themes.

A multi-chapter rumination on the cultural dilemma of the disgraced popular icon. Considering how collective, systematic failure led to cases of abuse from powerful figures in the cultural scene, this work proposes a conflict between the enjoyment of and respect for their creative work and what we now know (or at times failed to recognise) about their behaviour.

Alluding to one of Schwitters' lesser-known faces, as the author of playfully absurdist children's tales, Andrea Luka Zimmerman's Merzschmerz is a series of short recordings of young children reciting these stories from memory.

Fairy tales are handed down from mothers to daughters, and from fathers to sons. As they are passed on, the tales grow in the telling – or gradually depart from the original, as new elements get added, or others get cut.

Fairy tales are handed down from mothers to daughters, and from fathers to sons. As they are passed on, the tales grow in the telling – or gradually depart from the original, as new elements get added, or others get cut.

Don’t Look at the Finger follows a ceremonial ‘fight’ between two protagonists, a man and a woman, in the grand architectural setting of a church. The way the characters communicate is a feat of choreography that combines Kung Fu with signed languages to express a ritualistic coming together.

Einstein proposed that time might not flow linearly, suggesting that spacetime bends and warps under powerful matter, seen as gravity's fluctuations. During the pandemic, people experienced this concept firsthand: shrinking horizons made time seem to both stand still and race forward. Daniel Cockburn’s video Ahead of the Curve reflects this surreal period when norms vanished, and internet rabbit holes drew people in—either as black holes for doomscrolling or wormholes to discovery. Through a darkly comic narrative, Cockburn spins a tale full of unexpected twists, linking past and present with disorienting shifts in tone, setting, and tempo, offering hints of what might lie ahead.

A film tableau featuring Biswas's son and inspired by his first spoken sentence aged 18 months, in which he expressed his desire to have a horse live with him in his living room.

Fairy tales are handed down from mothers to daughters, and from fathers to sons. As they are passed on, the tales grow in the telling – or gradually depart from the original, as new elements get added, or others get cut.

A group of different people are asked to defend their citizenship and right to reside in the UK. What rights do we all really have?

Based on the rich history of public street parties in London’s East End, the film draws inspiration from the tradition of group portraiture in historic newsreel footage and photographs recording these events.