Programme notes for Figures in Focus 2024: Wanderlust
For this year’s ‘Figures in Focus’ programme, we are going on an adventure. The selected films examine the urge to explore the world, to travel, to feel the delight to roam. Hand in hand with this sense of wanderlust is the restlessness felt by some, the need to escape their situation, or to return to places in their memories. Our daring explorers, whether they be children or elders, find the courage to take a leap into the unknown and to seek something better.
Our journey sets off with Mary Martins taking us to Lagos, which she first visited as a small child in her joyful short, Childhood Memories. This film is the first of many to centre the filmmaker’s first-hand, personal experience, enhanced by a poetic voiceover shared by Mary. Footage of bustling market life is combined with collaged African textiles patterns and stop motion perambulations of mini Mary experiencing a delightful culture shock. This film is a sensory feast, a magical travelogue, and a charming tribute to family.
Kathrin Steinbacher’s In Her Boots also features the relationship between a grandchild and grandmother with warmth and humour. Together the two women laugh, dance and eat eggs in the comfort of Grandmother Heidi’s home. Heidi fiercely holds onto her worn out hiking boots, a symbol of the freedom and vitality that she has enjoyed since her childhood, that is now at risk in her later years and cognitive decline. She travels back to her past adventures in her mind whilst delicately holding on to reality in the present.
A mystical transformation occurs to the protagonist of Barbara Rupik’s Such Miracles Do Happen. In their small town, the religious statues have miraculously become animate and departed, though only the child seems awed by this development. She is fixated by the physical movement of living creatures as it is, given that she herself is reliant on her mother to move about. The paint on clay technique adds to the eeriness of this peculiar tale. Shimmering, shifting textures intensifying the unease.
Waldeinsamkeit is the German expression for the feeling that is brought about by experiencing solitude in a forest. Made in the aftermath of the pandemic, when many were looking to connect with nature, Silvana Roth presents the joy of leaving the claustrophobia and commotion of city life for the wilderness. A solitary older woman finds pleasure in the simple acts of climbing a tree and walking on grass with her bare feet. The collaged, hand painted frames invoking something wholesome and elemental.
Rachel Gutgarts roams the sombre streets of her youth in Via Dolorosa. The film is a ritual, a repentance, a return to troubling times. We are plunged into a thriving and volatile city at night; a fragmentary place of pounding punk music, late night feasting, banal chatter, and intoxicated brawls. The monochromatic printed frames underscoring the contrast of the bright city lights and the shadowy goings on. Geometric patterns scattered throughout point to this melting pot of the sacred and profane. What hides in the shadows of the silence? What dark violence is hinted at in the filmmaker’s past?
In Our Bed is Green, Maggie Brennan imagines a woman escaping into her sapphic fantasies with the aid of technology. The futuristic city she inhabits is loud, neon, consumerist. A place where you can fulfil your sexual fantasies thanks to advanced data mining technology. Away from real life, Cecily selects a verdant jungle fantasy space to enact her fancy. This bittersweet short speaks to the loneliness of modern living and the escapism that technology offers us. In a time of where AI tools enable the creation of deepfake porn, this film delicately speculates on how far we might go to escape our daily lives and fuel our obsessions.
Another film that centres on the filmmaker’s real life journey overseas is Utopia Portals. Here Jessica Ashman documents here her first trip to her homeland of Jamaica as an adult. She incorporates audio and footage of the expedition, manipulated within her layered, painted frames. The combination of the real and the abstract, creates something uncanny and dreamlike on screen; something that is simultaneously splendid and melancholic. The film a threshold between belonging and estrangement, with much left unspoken.
In Cwch Deilin (Leaf Boat) byEfa Blosse-Mason, the uncertainty within a couple’s romance is explored. They fantastically navigate the stormy seas of their relationship in a small leaf boat, literally portraying what it is to be ‘in the same boat’. In this heartfelt tale the characters undertake a nautical adventure whilst boldly communicating their fears and desires with their ‘what ifs’ brought to life visually. Warm colours and linocut style shadows heighten the emotion of the piece. Can the pair reconcile their differences and take a chance on the unknown?
Isabel Herguera invites three mehndi artists at a creative workshop in Ahmedabad to share their feminist utopian dreams and their drawings. Inspired by Begum Rokeya Hossain’s book ‘Sultana’s Dream’, which Isabel has since reimagined as a feature animation, in La Mujer Ilustrada (The Illustrated Woman) the women dream of the freedom of movement, of the pleasure of dancing, and of subverting authority. The wonderful henna tattoo style drawings come to life amongst the vibrant digital collage of the women and bustling city life. It’s a rousing short positing hope for the next generation to achieve the equality and freedom they deserve.
And the last stop on the tour finds us with Torrill Kove as she remembers her bittersweet adolescence spent in Nairobi in Maybe Elephants. As with several of the films, Torill narrates her storywith the wisdom and distance of adulthood. Looking back to an era when her mother had to balance career and childcare, whilst forever restless and yearning for autonomy. Starting with the flickering lines, the fragments of recollections, Torill deftly considers the subjectivity and unreliability of memory. In the end, the uncertainty that there were elephants and the significance of this is delicately recalled.
I hope this selection inspires adventure, whilst offering space to consider one’s own relationship to locations in the past, present and future, and within the recesses of our minds.
The ‘Figures in Focus’ programme was devised in 2017 in recognition of the under-representation of female and non-binary animators, and their stories, within the independent animation sector. The programme spotlights some of the incredible work crafted by contemporary animators, both in the UK and internationally.
With thanks to Jessica Ashman, Silvana Roth, Efa Blosse-Mason, Nag Vladermersky, Claude TC, Waltraud Grausgruber, Elizabeth Hobbs, Kate Anderson, Samantha Moore, Ellie Land, Gary Thomas, and all the featured filmmakers, their producers, and distributors.
Header image: In Her Boots, Kathrin Steinbacher.