Personal Truth

A video essay on the enduring cinematic tussle between frame and container.

How to be a documentary filmmaker in the UK? It's all about what hotel bar you know. A video essay about the accessibility of film festivals, focused on the 2018 edition of Sheffield Doc/Fest.

In 1970, filmmaker Peter Kubelka designed a movie auditorium in which carefully controlled sight lines and black velvet caused all but the screen to disappear into darkness. He referred to his invisible cinema as “a machine for viewing.” In these adventures in vision, directors Oscar Raby, Richard Misek, and Charlie Shackleton use real-time VR experience, live performance, and video essay to transform the Egyptian theater into “machines for viewing” to explore how we watch films.

Sometime in the 1980s, Caspar Salmon's grandmother was invited to a gathering on the Welsh island of Anglesey, attended exclusively by people with fish surnames. Or so he says. Thirty years later, film-maker Charlie Lyne attempts to sort myth from reality.

Fragments of hundreds of films from around the world bring together an ensemble cast of actors with one thing in common: each is no longer alive. Together, they contend with a fragile existence lived solely through these traces of their work.

In the summer of 1990, a teenage filmmaker successfully raises $100,000 to shoot a pioneering horror film. 25 years later, he tells the story of a cult classic that never was.

A one-take audio-visual poem in which artist Ross Sutherland revisits a twenty-year-old episode of the popular English soap opera EastEnders as a form of self-reckoning.

A vision of darkness in eighteen films.

The story of sixteen men put on trial for sadomasochism in the dying days of Thatcher's Britain was told by the police, the prosecution and the tabloid press — but not by those in the dock.

A ten-hour unbroken shot of white paint drying on a brick wall, watched in its entirety by the UK's film censor board.