LFF Experimenta 2023: collectivity and solidarity in hostile times

The power of collectivity anchors this year’s Experimenta programme, both in terms of the process of filmmaking and as a political stance. This attitude was reflected in the co-programming process as we discussed geopolitical complexities within the space of artists’ moving image. We wanted our programme to become a chorus voicing the perspectives and artistic strategies which felt urgent.

Co-struggleship and resistance interweave and recur throughout the programme, showing a shared interest in a type of image-making that seeks to empathise deeply with how we live today. Each work in the programme is an attempt to articulate how we assert ourselves defiantly in order to survive and thrive in the shadows of colonial histories, political conflicts, parasitic economic forces, and climate catastrophes.

What is a collectively authored film? What does it look like? Filmmaking is intrinsically collaborative as we are reminded each time we quietly leave the cinema while the end credits continue to roll. However the film world historically emphasises the idea of a single author, the mastermind behind the product: the director. This may relate to our habitual and internalised narrative of individualism, which perpetuates capitalist logic.

Borrowing its title from organiser and prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba, Everything Worthwhile Is Done with Other People explores the traumatic impacts of borders, displacement and incarceration. EWiDwOD Collective – made up of a group of women from South Africa, Ghana, Jamaica, Albania, Nigeria and Iraq currently residing in the UK – deconstruct their lived experiences and reconstruct possibilities of freedom and the need “to be somewhere else”.

Artist Rehana Zaman and producers Amal Khalaf and Elizabeth Graham have worked together with the collective over the past seven years, finding a balance between moving towards a (finished) film and being fully immersed in the process. In this work, all things are relational and we are asked to question whose perspective(s) we are looking at the world from. Yet understanding this film solely as a work of multiperspectivity would be to undermine the efforts of the makers; the radical language of this work is ultimately rooted in their deep commitment to solidarity and transformative justice. In doing this, they offer a small glimpse into a shared journey which continues to unfold with “light and shadow”.

Fragments coalesce to create a rich musing on land sovereignty and bodily autonomy in Fox Maxy’s debut feature Gush. A filmmaker of Kumeyaay and Payómkawichu heritage based in California, Maxy’s films have often used phone recordings to establish a sense of intimacy and immediacy in the work, and in Gush, this approach combines with energetic editing to make for a lively joyride of a film.

The politics of space are also explored in the shorts programme The Land Is the Living Witness, featuring works that examine our relationships to place. Sky Hopinka’s work Sunflower Siege Engine traces the carceral nature of Indigenous reservations in the US. The extractive nature of colonialism is made visible through the experience of artefacts as they are displaced from Syria to a Berlin Museum in Nafis Fathollahzadeh’s film Khabur, and in Desert Dreaming digital collage is used to activate a dialogue on labour migration from Sri Lanka to southwest Asia in the 1970s. These moving image works situate various global perspectives side by side to create debate while simultaneously creating new aesthetic forms.

Speculative fiction can be a useful tactic for confronting unfathomable forms of trauma. In particular, aspects of the horror genre, through its beyond-real lens, can make unthinkable experiences tangible, present them as they are felt, and sometimes show us a way to exist despite them. Tools from this genre can also assist in revealing and pointing to the causes, the forces and entities behind these various traumas, be they personal, systemic, ideological and/or geopolitically motivated.

Opening the shorts programme For the Haunted and Possessed, Notes from Gog Magog by Riar Rizaldi connects the stories of two workers at disparate ends of a global tech company’s labour force. Each is confronted with the company’s policies (explicit and non-explicit expectations), products and philosophy in horrifically invasive ways. Anxieties surrounding AI-generated imagery are viscerally on display as worker and nebulously sourced images interlace and swirl together on screen.

Concluding this programme, Onset by Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich envisions Russian state imperialism as demonic possession. Case studies in Ukraine, Syria and Belarus reveal the overt/covert methods used by the invading entity to extract resources, deploying tendrils to drain energy, life-forces. Potentialities of resistance begin to bubble up through the fog of war in the form of sigil making, the power of naming to shine a light, a step on the path toward exercising entities.