Estate, a Reverie

Between dream and nightmare, The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow is a traversal of here and elsewhere, first and third world; a fairytale of production, resources, capitalism, globalisation , refuse and refusal: The Delmarva Chicken of Tomorrow is a film not about the struggle to be seen, but about the struggle to see.

Filmed by Indonesian workers during their working hours on rubber and palm oil plantations, this film exposes the devastating role of militarism and repression in building the “global economy.” Through chilling first hand accounts, hilarious improvised interventions, collective debate, and archival footage, the film explores the relationships between trade, Third World debt, and international institutions like the IMF and World Bank.

Ten Londoners and a dog. They dance together, steal together, eat together; agree and disagree, celebrate their differences and share their talents. They spark a debate about the world we live in, who has stolen what from whom, and how things might be fixed.

'Bo' Gritz is one of America's highest decorated Vietnam veterans and the real life inspiration behind Rambo. He also killed 400 people, turned against Washington and moved to the Nevada desert where he now sleeps with many weapons. Filmed over ten years using impressive visual material, Zimmerman's portrait of Bo embodies contemporary American society in all its dizzying complexity and contradictions.

Andrew Kötting's film retraces John Clare's journey from Epping Forest to Northamptonshire accompanied by a straw bear.

A child is drawn to the stillness of nature beyond a city. A teenager, rising from sleep in a thicket, makes their way back to a trailer: to warmth, a caretaker, a dog. But the thudding on hard concrete from the highway above is no comfort. A tree envelopes a fence with its growth – grasses sprout through cracked and decaying industry. The individual is searching, pushing forward through landscapes and time. Adulthood leads into the forest.

Three attempts at reconnecting with often traumatic pasts, all leading to flights from home and the need for personal reinvention. A documentary triptych of many layers and emotions, whose parts connect with each other in unexpected ways.

Art Class (2020, 49 mins) is a filmed performance lecture playing on, and exploring, the perennial tension between the two key words in its title. It uses the tropes of scholarly presentation and personal confession alongside extracts from the artist’s work, guest interventions, martial arts and meditation exercises and evidentiary found material. The film tests the limits of access that working-class artists have to cultural production and to the relevant institutions circulating these outcomes. Alternately playful and provocative, serious and satirical, Art Class favors wit over weaponizing and reflection over rhetoric but does not pull its punches when it comes to the real obstructions to working class creative progress, or to the strategies necessary to overcome such outmoded hindrances.

Taşkafa is a real dog and also a legend on the streets of Istanbul. John Berger begins Taşkafa’s story, reading from his novel, King, the story of the disappearance of a community told from a dog’s perspective. The area’s ordinary people – taxi drivers, shopkeepers, street traders – care deeply about the welfare of the city’s street dogs and they tell us stories about Taşkafa and their other canine neighbours. The animals are a symbol of community living, where people (and dogs) look out for each other, but this is a community in transition; one from which dogs are starting to be expelled. Eccentric, amusing and very warm, the film is a powerful indictment of the impact of global politics and the economic appropriation of public space but, even more, it is a tribute to both the spirit of resistance and to city life that can accommodate people and dogs together.

This deeply exploratory work is drawn exclusively from the eclectic personal and public archive, in multiple formats, of Andrea’s life until their lasting estrangement from both parents, aged 30.