Communion

An unconventional portrait of painter Frida Kahlo and photographer Tina Modotti. Simple in style but complex in its analysis, it explores the divergent themes and styles of two contemporary and radical women artists working in the upheaval of the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution.

Temenos means a sacred site or ritual precinct. Temenos, the film, explores the phenomenon of visionary experiences. In the film we see locations where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared, including Lourdes, Fatima and Medjugorje in Bosnia & Herzegovina where the visions continue. Nina Danino films the landscapes that have witnessed these transcendental appearances, imbuing them with a sense of the sacred.

A film on Saint Teresa that leads us through an unnervingly authentic extreme state of religious and sexual ecstasy. With the central image of the statue of Saint Teresa of Avila in Rome, together with glimpses of colour-saturated flower gardens, the Crucifixion and Baroque plasterwork, we listen to the gulping and frenetically clipped voice of the ‘saint’ pouring out her rapturous lament, attempting to express the unsayable. The film’s soundtrack combines a spoken voice by Nina Danino and performed vocals by New York experimental singer Shelley Hirsch.

Gibraltar as a real place – and an imagined geography and history. In the first part, the camera travels around West Berlin picking out touristic monuments and describing them in terms of their significance to military history… In the second half (in which the commentary also charts the escalation of land frontier sea and air restrictions), a ferry leaves a quayside and sails into the open Strait. It is an image of freedom but also a melancholy image of parting.

Stabat Mater opens and closes with two sung laments, then launches into a breathless torrent of words and phrases, a re-reading of the eternal feminine of Joyce’s Ulysses, which echoes the exultant/feverish swoop of the camera through a Mediterranean landscape

Documentary about the composer Elizabeth Maconchy, filmed during the rehearsal of a new composition

Readings from the poets Byron, Keats, Brontë, Tennyson, Coleridge and songs from the dark repertoire of the singer Nico with portraits from the films of Philippe Garrel circa 1975 and Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls and swirling electronic music from Ash Ra Tempel and new electric guitar sound track by James Creed and tracks to the songs by Graham Dowdall aka Gagarin and ex of The Faction with new images of the River Thames put together in an elegy on iconicity, vocality, finitude and solitude.

The film unfolds the life of an enclosed monastery over the course of one day. It invites the audience into a world of enclosure which is rarely seen from the inside. It is a portrait of both the interior of the building and of Jennifer, a Carmelite nun.

Spanish popular copla songs and their mighty female singers are the focus of this evocative film.

The interior of a house. Outside, the sun parches the landscape. A woman’s voice tells a story. Filmed from 35mm slide projection on 16mm reversal Fuji film with in camera fades and pans.

Venice is empty, the protagonist walks from the grand sights and interiors into the backstreets, a figure at twilight walking the alley ways and into the dark night to meet the Devil at dawn. The film follows a path via the remnants of Romanticism and Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil in search of beauty, opulence exotic pleasure and lovers, by Venice. It follows the bohemian idea of escapism as a form of radical resistance and as an act of sensuality in the Director’s own cinematic female gaze.

Black and white Super 8 footage is combined with HD images of black and white photographs held in close up reflection, as thoughts and responses to these images are spoken live to the camera. The images are indices of disappearance as are the audio fragments of cinema films (La Dolce Vita 1960 and The Gospel According to St. Matthew 1964) from the same time as the photographs were taken.

In Greenwich Park, London two lovers stroll and talk about love, their relationship and the making of a film in Venice. The Venice film is shot on 16mm. Venice at dawn is empty and a protagonist sits at the empty San Marco Piazza, it glides in a detached manner from the grand sights and facades and interiors of Palazzos into the backstreets. In guilded interiors and painted ceilings, as the winter afternoon light weakens in a soporific atmosphere, she lays in dark interiors with frescoes of Antiquity. Like the Risen, at twilight she walks the alleyways and into the dark to meet the Devil at dawn. Featuring the actor Pietro Fanelli – the Devil makes a fleeting but impactful appearance, the protagonist offers herself to his gaze and touch.

MARIA is Nina Danino’s 5th feature length film and a sister film to the recent SOLITUDE (2022) with Nico (Velvet Underground) as icon, screen and poet. The two films form a diptych about powerful iconic women building on Nina Danino’s longterm artistic practice exploring the voice and religious iconography.

The rough voices of men (from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accatone ) open the film soundtrack, they banter in Italian about taking flowers to the cemetery. Filmed in Granada and Seville during Holy Week. The soundtrack mixes a cacophony of the music of the marching bands recorded live on location, the ambience of the crowds and the sung laments. The centre piece is The Silence, a totemic hyper realist effigy from the 17th century which processes at midnight in total silence along the streets where the lighting has been turned off. After it passes, we cross over into the light and noise of a new day – where people throng the streets, sit in cafes and enjoy life. Popular devotion is expressed in death intertwined with the applause for life in the energy of the Baroque.

A 16mm portrait in response to the idea of simplicity and poverty which is the guiding principle of the Poor Clares and their ‘hidden’ life. Filmed in the enclosed Monastero di Santa Chiara, San Marino. The nuns spend the morning in the ‘laboratorio’ sewing, mending, ironing, in the kitchen preparing the midday meal and in the garden, tending to the animals and cultivation.