A Long History of Madness

A group of charismatic young Asian women audition for the recasting of Kanchi from Powell and Pressburger’s 1947 Black Narcissus.

Between age three and four, Vera Loumpet-Galitzine traverses many landscapes, exploring where she comes from, to come into her own. We follow her to her school and neighbourhood activities in France, Cameroon and Russia. As Vera dances, sings and runs around these visually engaging landscapes, seemingly easily integrated into her rich fantasy world, we attempt to imagine what they look like to her. What does she see, think, or imagine?

Williams Gamaker revisits the life of Merle Oberon to expose the racial politics of early cinema and examines how Oberon’s mixed heritage was erased under the pressures of Hollywood’s racial hierarchies.

A study of Merle Oberon, in a screen test for an unrealised project which became The Red Shoes (1948).

What if Sabu and Anna May Wong turned the tables on Michael Powell and his crew, during the making of The Thief of Baghdad?

Three awesome portraits of brown queers who take no shit.

​The Fruit is There To Be Eaten is based on the 1947 film Black Narcissus, by British directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger., set in India. The work echoes the style of the source material in that it is set in India, but replaces painted backdrops with back projection, stock footage and revealed sets to reimagine the relationship between lower-caste dancing girl Kanchi and missionary nun Sister Clodagh. In a schoolroom and in the gardens of a Himalayan convent, Kanchi and Clodagh recognise they are trapped in a film set in 2016. With the colonies a distant memory, Clodagh has lost her role as sister superior. This allows Kanchi to introduce her gods in order to challenge an imposed belief system, and in so doing to break down the civility of the colonies into something more carnal.

With the non-existing word “refugee-dom” Lena Verhoeff and I wanted to express the state, emotional and physical, of the life of the refugee on the road. On everyday television, we see images of people walking with luggage and small children and exhausted faces. But our theme was a bit different. The phrase “lonely but not alone” came from an autobiography of former Dutch queen Wilhelmina, published in 1959, to describe her life as always surrounded by a dense crowd of people at court but still, always feeling lonely. The two qualifiers, lonely and alone, which seem to be synonymous, are here, through the conjunction “but”, rather presented as an opposition; an opposition qualifying a non-existing noun.

The Eternal Return explores the phenomenon of how a performer of colour such as international actor Sabu might be treated and thought of in a way analogous to the animals with whom he appears. In Sabu’s case this was the conflation of his background as mahout son’s with his career as actor that imposed a seemingly inescapable relationship with elephants: the animals recur throughout his filmography. It also highlights how, in spite of his extraordinary fame Sabu was always the sidekick and never the love interest. With the use of a combination of live-action dramatised recreation and British Pathé stock footage re-edited and altered with VFX, The Eternal Return revisits the now-struggling Sabu in 1951 as he supports his family by performing – once more with a troupe of elephants – in Tom Arnold’s Christmas Circus in Haringey Arena.

An aesthetically invigorating reworking of the casting process of Sidney Franklin’s The Good Earth (1937), a film notorious for a white actor’s racist portrayal of a Chinese character.