Strange Object

People dance in private moments of personal abandon across London in the summer of 2001. The film is the result of the director’s work with the first ten respondents to a local newspaper advertisement that she placed seeking ‘living-room dancers’ – people who love to dance behind closed doors.

Gaza, December 2023. A confrontation with a disturbing photograph on social media triggers questions about what it means to be an onlooker.

While investigating her late parents’ involvement with the Anglo Iranian Oil Company (BP), the filmmaker comes across the letters of a petroleum geologist in Iran in the 1930s who was later to embark on a search for the origins of civilisation. The Host sets out on its own exploration, to decipher signs from the fragmented images buried in the BP archive. This journey through the past interweaves a number of stories drawn from both personal memory and the records of an imperial history, which builds a picture of a 20th-century colonial encounter. The Host is a personal essay film about the stories we tell about ourselves and others, the facts and fictions we live by, and their consequences. Followed by a discussion with Miranda Pennell.

The empty spaces of an ambiguous building open-up to reveal a group of aspiring musicians as they play together, alone. Drum Room reflects on relationships between individual and group, as young musicians express their collective and individual identities within the ordered conventions of the institution they inhabit.

A strange presence is haunting the images in the Crawford Collection, at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, and spreading across the city of London: an echo of the curse of the Pharaohs, a spectral menace is manifesting itself in the form of a mysterious malaise. - M. Mecca

Back stroke butterfly, front crawl and bras, we are awash in an ocean of bubbles. Meanwhile Captain Ahab sets sail on his magic carpet in search of the whale. All is not well in the world but Eden is there, fresh from her garden, tuning into “The Far Away Land”. We are deep in the cloud of our own making but help is at hand, and everything might yet be alright.

Twenty-one dancers are held by your gaze. Losing contact can be traumatic. Twenty-one dancers play a game of cat and mouse with an unpredictable camera. Disoriented, the viewer is fixed by the gaze of dancers who crowd the frame. …On the one hand this is like looking at a group of aliens who have never seen anything like the camera (or you) before. The concentration of the faces on what is before them takes away their self-consciousness, and like a series of Thomas Ruff portraits they have an unsettling air of insouciance. But ultimately, the thought one is drawn to, and the allegory the title suggests, concern the contemporary obsession with becoming visible through some sort of brush with celebrity, however brief, demeaning or meaningless that might be.

The memoirs of a medical missionary on the Afghan borderlands provides the starting point for a film constructed from still photographs of colonial life on the North West frontier of British India at the turn of the 20th century. The film plays sound against image in a search for clues as to the stories behind images and finds striking continuities in Western portrayals of a distant place and people.

In this ghostly tale, Pennell turns her forensic eye to the history of the Dutch “cultivation system” in Indonesia. “I am a ghost returned to tell the tale from the place where the end began”, says the narrator, a stand-in for the many primates violently extracted from their jungle habitats to be exhibited in museums and fairs in Europe.