Laura Waddington

CARGO is the story of a journey, I made on a container ship with a group of Rumanian and Filipino sailors, who were delivering cargo to the Middle East. I stayed on the ship six weeks. Most of the sailors weren’t allowed to leave the boat and they spent their days waiting, singing karaoke and telling me stories in a small TV room. In Syria, the ports were military zones. I hid at a porthole and secretly filmed the life below: a man stealing wood, a soldier fishing off the edge of an abandoned submarine. Later, I made a narrative, that falls between reality and fiction. It was a way of showing the limbo these men were living in.

In 2002, Laura Waddington spent months in the fields around Sangatte Red Cross camp, France with Afghan and Iraqi refugees, who were trying to cross the channel tunnel to England. Filmed at night with a small video camera, the figures lit only by the distant car headlights on the motorways, Border is a personal account of the refugees' plight and the police violence that followed the camp's closure.

Still is a short video made in a few weeks for Outrage & Rebellion, a collective film protesting police violence in France. The project was initiated by Nicole Brenez and Nathalie Hubert, in response to the blinding of filmmaker Joachim Gatti in one eye, when a police officer fired a flash-ball into a group of peaceful protestors in Montreuil in July 2009. It was first published on the website of the online newspaper Mediapart on December 10, 2009, with a new part released each day, and remained accessible for several months.