The Bird Game

A docked piglet’s journey through the hierarchies of a fetish world explores inter-species and gender relationships in Marianna Simnett’s wonderfully dark and visceral fairytale.

A female figure, a contemporary Athena trapped in a technicolour blue forest.

In Simnett’s stop motion animation film and intricate sculptures depicting hybrid human-animal creatures, she wields the aesthetic of vintage children’s television programming, soft play areas, and modernist asylums to explore the emotional and material entanglements of love and cruelty. To create the characters in her film, Simnett not only literally reanimates roadkill but reclaims – and thereby empowers – the image of the animal to plumb the depths of some of the darkest, most fundamental aspects of being human.

Blue Roses moves between an operating theatre, a cockroach laboratory, and a blue netherworld representing the interior of a knee. It blends documentary techniques (non-actors playing versions of themselves) with hallucinatory shifts in setting and character that disrupt our ability to distinguish what is real from what is imagined.

WINNER is a short film inspired by Graham Greene's 1954 short story The Destructors. Marianna Simnett re-imagines the setting from post-war London to a modern football pitch.