ABOUT THE FILMS

Les Vestiges
Dir. Rebecca Birch & Sarah Casey | UK/France | 12 mins | 2024

Filmed in Valais and Bern, Switzerland, Les Vestiges follows artist Sarah Casey’s collaboration with glacial archaeologists Pierre-Yves Nicod and Regula Gubler. The film explores the precarity of glacial archaeology and the fragile interface between drawing, ice, and time. Using heat-sensitive drawings that visibly react to their environment, Casey visualises the often-invisible elements—heat, erosion, wind—that shape both the glacier and the archaeological artefacts emerging from it.

Set around the Loetschenpass, one of Switzerland’s most important glacial archaeological sites, the film juxtaposes delicate mark-making with massive geological shifts. It premiered at 2690m above sea level at the Loetschenpass Hut, itself part of the environment it reflects upon. Les Vestiges forms part of an extension of the ‘Emergency!’ project, asking what film can reveal about environmental transformations otherwise unnoticed or unrecorded.

The Wool Aliens
Dir. Julia Parks | UK/Jamaica | 28 mins | 2023

In this richly textured 16mm essay film, Julia Parks explores the story of early 20th-century botanist Ida Hayward, whose investigations linked the global wool industry to the migration of plant seeds via sheep’s fleeces. Filmed in the Scottish Borders, The Wool Aliens draws surprising connections between botany, trade, industry, and colonialism, tracing the ecological footprints left by textile production.

Part archival exploration, part field study, the film presents a lyrical account of how economic networks become embedded in local ecologies, specifically through the River Tweed. Parks’ footage evokes the entanglement of past and present, human and non-human, native and alien.

a river holds a perfect memory
Dir. Hope Strickland | UK | 17 mins | 2024

Spanning rivers and coastlines in Jamaica and Northern England, Hope Strickland’s evocative film examines water as a repository of memory, labour, and colonial histories. The work juxtaposes lush footage of rafting on Jamaica’s Martha Brae River and a luminous night-time journey through Falmouth’s bioluminescent lagoon, with archival material documenting industrial development in the UK, including the construction of reservoirs in Rochdale.

Through a hybrid aesthetic combining 16mm film, archival images, and LIDAR scans, Strickland explores the poetics and politics of the river. The film’s title is inspired by Toni Morrison’s writing, and its form mirrors the movements of water itself—errant, cyclical, and resistant. Originating in research around labour protests in Jamaica in 2016, the film traces diasporic and ecological connections between seemingly distant landscapes, drawing them together in the flow of memory and resistance.