Screening Programme

See our Events page to view the talks

Oona Grimes Horsepolish 2021
S16mm and digital. Academy ratio 9 mins
In conversation with Gareth Evans
Monday 12 December 2022 6-8pm - Fully booked

De Sica meets Dr Barnardo at the Ragged School Museum.

In what plays as an outtake from some larger narrative, Horsepolish returns to the marginalised and the overlooked. The work of scrubbing and polishing calls up ghosts, enacting past stories. Street children – whether of Barnardo or de Sica’s era – conjure dreams of empowerment and freedom from the reality of their daily Sisyphean task. “…the fictional spaces of cinema become another resonant layer of history embedded in the architecture of the Ragged School Museum.” – Lucy Reynolds

Oona Grimes is a London based artist, primarily a chaser of language through drawing, clay making & film.
During Grimes’ 2018 Bridget Riley Fellowship at The British School at Rome she segued from thieving Lorenzetti tartans and cartoon detail from Etruscan paintings, to the appropriation of neorealist films – mis-remembered, imitated and low tech re- enacted: a physical drawing of herself captured on i-phone.

Gareth Evans is a London-based writer, editor, film and event producer and Whitechapel Gallery Adjunct Moving Image Curator.

Wool & Water

A Miracle film introducing Lewis Carroll to Pasolini
Pre-trailer

Louisa Fairclough Mental Falls 2022
Digital film
In conversation with Cherry Smyth
Wednesday 14 December 2022 6-8pm

Mental Falls explores the legacy of a loved one’s sketchbook. The lyrical essay film by Louisa Fairclough weaves the voices of singers with Louisa's own voice in a close observation of her sister Hetta Fairclough's sketchbook. Hetta (1973-2008) produced a remarkable sketchbook of drawings which take the form of assemblages and visual poems. These drawings of Hetta’s probe at the complexities of being, pulling on her own experience to give voice to psychological intensities, yet make no attempt towards cathartic expression. Page by page Louisa’s interpretation of her sister’s drawings - spoken and sung - becomes the soundtrack to the film.
Cherry Smyth writes "The spoken and sung ‘voice in difficulty’ responds to the written voice, embodying and extending its sphere of painful influence in a brilliant and enthralling vocal score."

Louisa Fairclough's practice takes the form of film, performances, field recordings and drawings. Can People See Me Swallowing showed at Prisme Festival in Nantes, France in 2021; Contact Film Festival, London (2016) and Spike Island, Bristol (2014). FEAR HOPE LIFE DEATH was shown as part of Song Cycle for the Ruins of a Psychiatric Unit at Danielle Arnaud (2017) and went onto Alchemy Film Festival (2018). Composition for a Low Tide, a performance by Rochester Cathedral Choristers, was commissioned with the film-sculpture Absolute Pitch by Whitstable Biennale 2014. Awkward Relaxed and I wish I could be a Stone were further performances with choristers in 2014. Other works include drawings and field recordings from the Thames commissioned by Estuary Festival (2016); Jeannie, a sound installation commissioned by Bristol New Music and Arnolfini in 2014; Flecks of a Brighter Colour commissioned by University of Bath (2014); Song of Grief and Bore Song (both 2011) which were shown at Danielle Arnaud and Camden Art Centre (2013). Bore Song was acquired by Contemporary Art Society for The Wilson Museum, Cheltenham and shown at Rojas + Rubensteen Projects in Miami (2017).

Cherry Smyth is a poet, novelist, critic and curator, born in Ireland, and based in London. Cherry Smith's latest poetry collection Famished is published by Pindrop Press in 2019. Her debut novel Hold Still was published by Holland Park Press in 2013. Her poetry collection Test, Orange, 2012, is available from Pindrop Press. One Wanted Thing, 2006, was published by Lagan Press. She writes regularly for Art Monthly, Modern Painters and Art Review. Cherry Smyth teaches poetry in the Creative Writing Department of the University of Greenwich. She was a Royal Literary Fellow, 2014-2016.

Sarah Pucill Eye Cut 2021
16 mm colour 20 mins
In conversation with Helen de Witt
Friday 16 December 2022 6-8pm



The film’s protagonist is a masked woman in a nude bodysuit, who wears a cardboard box that doubles as a theatre stage. The woman takes us on a surrealist journey in which she performs to an invisible applauding audience. Having passed through red curtains writhing on her back, she arrives on stage bearing a cake on her front. Hand-held cardboard puppets, that she makes from magazine cut-outs of faceless men, go on to take part in an ominous party scene around the cake, candle-lit and spinning. The audience see the woman in disguise, her eyes peeping through cut out eye holes of a man’s cardboard face, as if taking his place. She changes her mask and its gender throughout, sometimes wearing two. Flipping the card puppet-figures, she reveals on the backside, half formed sentences. These morse code- like hand-arm movements struggle to communicate something of the underside of the puppets’ pleasure.

Work in Progress...
Sarah Pucill  Double Exposure 2004
16mm. 25 minute extract


The work in progress, 'Double Exposure’, re-visits Pucill's film Stages of Mourning 20 years later where she performs both herself and her late partner and filmmaker Sandra Lahire in photographs they made together before she died. The film uses both slide projections and other means and shots of Brighton pier in colour 16mm bookend the film. More filming still to be done.

Sarah Pucill’s recent film Eye Cut (16mm, 20’, 2021) premiered at London Film Festival to a packed cinema audience and will be screened at Jeu de Paume in November as part of the Retrospective on Vivienne Dick. In 2022 it won best experimental film at Toronto Women Film Festival and at London New Wave Festival, and was screened at Danielle Arnaud Gallery December 2022. Eye Cut returns Pucill’s practice back to the film language of her early Surrealist interior sets and objects, where echoes of her first film You be Mother (1990) are revisited.
Sarah Pucill’s publicly funded films have been shown in galleries and won awards at Festivals internationally. The majority of her films take place within the confinements of domestic space, where the grounded reality of the house itself becomes a portal to a complex and multi layered psychical realm. In her explorations of the animate and inanimate, her work probes a journey between mirror and surface, in which questions of representation are negotiated. At the heart of much of the work is a concern with the image as a still, whether literally or symbolically. Relationships between self and other turn into a concern of relationships between women, mostly mother or lover.

Helen de Witt is a curator and lecturer specialising in artists’ film and independent cinema. She is programmer of BFI London Film Festival’s Experimenta. Helen is a lecturer in Film Studies at UCL and at Birkbeck University of London and a visiting lecturer at the National Film and Television School. She has published in film magazines and websites and contributed to a number of books on artists’ film.