Plymouth, UK English Face of the Other is an essay film and a series of moving portraits shot in the coastal city of Plymouth, England. The project is a response to social and political divisions in the UK. What is often missing in fractured political debates is the face of the other. The title of the work comes from the philosophy of Emanuel Levinas. For Levinas, “the face [is] a source from which all meaning appears”. The film situates the film in the landscape of Britain’s Ocean city, and reflects on its history and its varied natural environment.

A deeply personal film about anxiety, privilege, and the tricky business of bad things happening to us while even worse things happen to others. Shot entirely on an iPhone and narrated by a human and a computer voice, the film is a meditation on how fast-paced, goal-oriented, and measurable our lives have become. Does seeing the world through the lens of your phone breaks down or reinforces the boundary between the self and what surrounds it? Do you remember that year? strives to think away from the idea of a border as a mere geographical or political demarcation (although it features those too). Even though it contains footage from multiple countries and continents (Cambodia, Spain, Italy, United Kingdom), the film aims to explore the real and imaginary borders between the self and the world around it – based on experience, perception and positionality. Borders are also investigated through film form through the use of split screen.

A man drifts through transitory spaces on the way home.

Donna Haraway paraphrases Marilyn Strathern when she suggests that “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with” (2016). If an interview is a method (or matter) that we use when filming humans, what would occur if that method is applied to the non-human? This film results from an exploration of what an audio-visual interview with a tree could be like. Once I settled on the format of using the written questions to evoke the method of the interview, I found that this changed the way I cut the material together. Now the images needed to ‘answer’ rather than ‘be’. I went back to shoot new material because the ‘coverage’ I need for an interview differs from that of observational material. For instance, I shot new images of the sky, the nearby creek and the nearby road, as these were important parts of answering the question about place that I asked the tree. In an observational version of the edit these shots would form distractions from the central theme of the tree, and would never make the cut.

English with Telugu Philadelphia (USA) and Hyderabad (Indivar) In this film essay (a visual rumination), I set out to explore the implications of living in the USA and carrying out fieldwork in another city. I synchronized audio and still images from Hyderabad, with video montage of my everyday life and surroundings in Philadelphia to draw visual and sensory parallels.

Germany Supporting local transformations with the Grandhotel Cosmopolis: cultural politics, care and collaboration beyond the pandemic The film is an emotional, visual and narrative dimension of a collective learning process of a cultural institution that took place in the pandemic. The directors say: We aimed to interpretate provisional findings of an activist-research project that took place at a cultural institution in Augsburg (Germany) during the pandemic. Symbolised as “Grandhotel Cosmopolis Transformation Process” the project relates to the current crisis of culture production, raising questions on purpose, strategy and participants for the so often claimed need for cultural change towards more just, sustainable and fair urban life. Based on several municipalist engagements, it assembles in a post-structural interpretation what was learned on enabling and limiting conditions for the co-creation of collective actions towards urban transformation. Dwelling on self-organisation, collective reflection and re-signification, the architects for transformation experiment with practices of co-production. Understood as prefigurative practices they might serve as suggestions for urban planning in Augsburg and more specifically they intent to inform the following collective re-design of the 2600qm building that cultural institution wants to maintain as real world lab. When this film narrates the phase of deliberative orientation about this institutional re-design, a second film will accompany the implementation of hopefully co-designed modifications. The film itself was produced in collaboration of people who participated in and made sense in different ways of the “Grandhotel Cosmopolis Transformation Process”, but directed by the activist-researcher herself. The aesthetic form reflects its discontinuities, envisioned fears and hopes and ambiguities that belong to this collective learning in support of urban transformation beyond the pandemic.

Australia In 2019, we collected ‘B-roll’ footage from three locations in regional Australia during the first year of a three-year research project. During 2020, due to border closures, we were unable to return to complete filming but instead decided to make this short video. Inspired by Linda Lappin’s Soul of Place, we tweet to the landscape. Lappin suggests that in tweeting to landscape, writers should '[l]ook for the beautiful, sublime, picturesque, strange, or comic. Strive for the haiku effect' (p. 43). By combining this with panoramic images, we foreground what would have otherwise been the background while gesturing towards the posthuman. This film was made as part of a three-year project called Engaging Youth in Regional Australia, funded by the Australian Research Council. It was initially planned as a collaborative film-making project that would involve regional youth during 2020. In the first year of the project we travelled to these areas and took preliminary B-roll footage for potential use in the film-making stage of the project which was planned for the following year. Due to border closures in Australia, we were unable to return to these areas and complete the film. Having only B-roll footage presented a challenge as to whether it was possible to make a short video that foregrounded what we had originally intended would only form the background of what would be a human-centred production. We approached the making of the film from a posthuman perspective - one in which the human and non-human are entangled and not separate from one another. Each location in the study is heavily invested in primary production in Australia and so human intervention in the landscape as well as the ability of the landscape to resist these interventions are both evident. We decided aesthetically to use panoramic footage and include a 'text crawl' with a minimal amount of writing that might prompt a posthuman 'reading' of the landscape. Linda Lappin's book, The Soul of Place, provided inspiration for the text as tweets. We reference this with the use of hashtags. We are both creative geographers and have worked in various performative ways in past projects. Candice, especially, has experience in video editing and production but she has never before used B-roll footage in this way. There were many practice-based insights that we gained from being originally immersed in landscape to re-visiting that footage and then responding to it that are difficult to put into words. However, foregrounding the landscape and responding to it in an experimental way resonated with some of the more traditional, qualitative interviews that were conducted with participants as part of the wider project. In particular, the affective and material dimensions of regional youth engagement, whereby young people appreciate and treasure the natural environments in which they live, was something that we more keenly appreciated. Selected Reviews There is no sound as this is originally designed as an installation. There is a rendering of disjointed (posthuman) landscapes: urban environment with transportation, and physical landforms. Accompanied by texts. Could be a useful teaching tool if background is included when shown to students.

20:00 This film documents an island landscape in transition. Shot across seasons on the former military island of Örö on the Finnish Archipelago, the film highlights the tensions and transitions running through a landscape of nationally-important ecosystems and species, decaying and rusting military structures, war graves, Iron Age burial cairns and a nascent tourism industry. The film forms a new mode of documenting the tangles of life that pattern Örö, across various scales of space and time. Fusing techniques from geographical, film and sound art practices, it offers new approaches to storying ‘blasted’ Anthropocene landscapes.

Spanish, English and Portuguese with English Subtitles One, if by Land is not a film that attempts to have answers to the noisy debate around immigration policies, but through grim but evocative imagery of these journeys, it raises questions as to why this impossibility should exist in the first place.

Czech Republic Eastern Serbia Cultural Geographies Serbian (English Subtitles) As a child, Ivanka was chosen by fairy women for the special task of entering the realm of the dead to discover the future. As an old lady, the spirits have left her, so how does she navigate between the two worlds now? This experimental short documentary seeks out Ivanka, a woman who lives in rural Eastern Serbia and who spent most of her life falling into trance to enter the realm of the dead and learn about the future. Ethnographic archive materials from her days as a prophet are interwoven with contemporary footage shot now that the supernatural forces have left her. As such, the film aims to play on dualities of time and ontology to explore how this experience has affected her relationship to the landscape that surrounds her, while also engaging in a meta discourse on the digital nature of film and visualisation of memory. Selected Reviews The film is about people and places done through traditional singing that talks about fields and flowers and karst topography. Unusual and offers a window to a culture in specific locale that perform this ritual.