Colwood Gardens

mmm is an eclectic collection of the clouds captured in Japanese cinema from the 1920s to the present. Drawing inspiration from the 35mm film materials of Japanese physicist and cloud expert Masanao Abe (1891–1966) and scientist Tapio Schneider’s apprehension of a future with cloudless skies, mmm looks at formlessness as an essential actor in the history of cinema.

Made as a pilot film of Chiyo, At Altitude is a self-reflexive film of a filmmaker’s brief visit to her grandmother in the Japanese suburbs. Not having seen her grandmother for a while, as the filmmaker has been living abroad for the past 5 years, she uses a 16mm film camera as a mediation tool to reconnect with her grandmother. Interweaving the juxtaposition of inside and outside spaces, the film offers an intimate look at family life and ageing.

Inspired by Frances Glessner Lee’s Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death - a series of dioramas created to improve crime scene investigation, Fragments explores the act of observation through a 40s crime scene diorama.

Chiyo is a poetic exploration of the suburbs in Japan through the filmmaker’s reflection on the life of her grandmother. With a series of everyday moments in Yashio from a summer fair to Buddhist rituals, the film embodies micro-narratives, seeking cinema’s ability to offer a contemplative space.

Shortly before Christmas 1973, the crew of Skylab, NASA’s first space station, went on strike.

World-famous and already notorious Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein spent 1931 in Mexico, after the rejection of his projects in Hollywood. But the epic film he planned and largely shot would never be completed. In 2012, film historian Ian Christie visited the hacienda where Eisenstein spent much of his time in Mexico, to ask what really went on there, and discover what’s happened since. This essay film, made in partnership with Japanese filmmaker Chiemi Shimada, looks beyond the apparent failure, to ask what contemporary audiences – and Eisenstein himself – could still learn from Que Viva Mexico!