Obscura sets out to explore our entanglement with the seafloor by using seafloor sound and the Javanese traditional instrument Gamelan, mediating our seafloor and human relations. The film indicates how our global mineral production and electronic device consumption has driven more seafloor pollutions. Sound occupies private and public spaces. However, there is a sound we rarely hear in everyday life: seafloor sound. This underwater sound is situated in deep spaces. Thinking with the seafloor sound matters because the seafloor sound is a primary indicator used to find tin ores, beneath the seabed. Tin ores are a critical metal for electronic devices and automobile manufacturers, which means the sound of the seafloor is the bedrock of our modern infrastructure. In this way, this sonic wave we hear mediates our unexpected ecological relation with a distant yet intimate place, the ocean-floor.

Arizona USA English French In Southern Arizona, it is not unusual to see rivers that have dried up. Some only flow in specific sections or at certain times of the year. They are known as intermittent rivers. At the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) iGlobes laboratory, located within the University of Arizona, researchers study these precarious rivers in the city of Tucson, and in the watershed of Las Cienegas in Southern Arizona.

Shropshire, England and Powys, Wales On the border of England and Wales, two ancient pathways cross. Their stories emerge through poetry and song. In this poetry film, the Kerry Ridgeway takes on the character of a lovelorn maiden. The Offa's Dyke Path is explored as a site of repeated movement of people and livestock over time, carving out ditches, hollows and histories. The film plays upon conventions of hauntology within folk music, poetry and folk horror cinema. "The film set out to explore poetry film as a medium for engaging with place. It considers how taking time to pause in a place can affect our relationship to it, and deepen our sense of connection. I found that taking the time to interact closely with a specific location enabled me to forge deeper connections with that place, and to respond creatively in a way that sought connections between the traces of the past and the detail of the present. I found that following instinct and allowing the process to develop organically resulted in a piece that was led by the place interaction, rather than being dictated by preconceived ideas. And that the process of pulling together the audiovisuals with poetic ideas in the editing suite generated new creative ideas and a lasting connection to the place encountered." This poetry film forms part of a collection entitled 'PAUSE', which examines the ways in which we connect to place, and how taking time to pause can impact on those connections. Created as part of practice-led PhD at Keele University in partnership with Writing West Midlands, with additional supervision from staff at the Centre for Place Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. This research is supported by the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership, part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, New Zealand A ‘Dash of Home’ participates in the settler-colonial practices of seeing Indigenous land through European image-making practices. Drawing from historical colonial images of Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand, the film disrupts the English settler’s drive to see a ‘dash from Home’ in colonial images. The film co-opts colonial image-making strategies by introducing more-than-representational materials into the space of drawing. A ‘Dash of Home’ offers a critical engagement with colonial imagery that gives historical images immediacy, emphasising the material impact of historical representations on the past, present and future. A ‘Dash of Home’ participates in the settler-colonial practice of contemplating Indigenous land as European landscape. Lifted from the publication English Reaction to the New Zealand Landscape, the phrase ‘dash from Home’ describes the strategy of portraying Aotearoa New Zealand, through the landscape preferences of future setters. A ‘Dash of Home’ foregrounds the collective and iterative processes in which colonial images are made. Botanical illustrations from James Cook’s first voyage, town plans and ‘on the spot’ views of Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, produced by the New Zealand Company, were drawn and re-drawn, passing through different hands, changing mediums, and travelling between different lands. Each re-drawing presented the physical aspects of the land but, more significantly, heightened the drawings’ affective qualities, becoming a vehicle for ongoing colonisation. This film seeks ways of altering the ‘dash of home’ mentality through simple and literal moves of adding and extracting materiality within the fictional space of the drawing. A ‘Dash of Home’ continues the tradition of adding the familiar to an unknowable land but equally explores what conceptions of home must first efface before contemplation can take place. "After making the film, I began to reflect on the commonalities between the different representations shown in the work: botany, town plans and landscape scenes. This led to the eighteenth and nineteenth-century practice of scientific illustration called ‘truth-to-nature.’ Scientists and artists collaborated to represent the typical or ideal seen in nature. In the context of my work, truth-to-nature provided a linking mechanism between botany and the more expansive geographical projections, such as landscape plans and perspectives. I began to interpret my work as co-opting or extending truth-to-nature to a broader range of colonial representations. My approach and understanding of ‘truth’ are reimagined in this work. ‘Truth’ in truth-to-nature is not what was physically seen but a kind of contemplative sight. A sight that is distanced from the existing world, allowing new, usually detrimental, ways of seeing. In my work, the idea of ‘truth’ is still emerging. One interpretation is that truth is found in revisiting a specific location’s past and showing that its historical representations have real material effects while offering a mode of inquiry for countering a singular future. Films’ duration, movement and sound offer vitality and immersive affects to our interaction with historical images. For this project, film is a medium that makes the images feel immediate. Film, as opposed to still images, also offered a way to show my participation with the images through time, not fixed in time, as with the source images. One challenge of this project was finding nuance to the tactic of staging colonial image-making strategies while simultaneously countering them."

Cairo Egypt Arabic with English Subtitles One of five short films made by young residents of Al Khalifa neighbourhood in Cairo, Egypt. In Tok Tok the filmmakers tell the story of a dog's encounter with a Tok Tok on Al Khalifa's busy streets (local taxi). Made during the Urban Dreams filmmaking workshop. During their two week mid-year school break in 2023, young residents of the al-Khalifa neighbourhood in historic Cairo. got acquainted with urban wildlife helped by various field visits inside and outside the neighbourhood. The young filmmakers then went on to conceptualise, draft and shoot their short films using their phones, in order to share stories of place that reveal their relationship with Al-Khalifa’s natural and urban heritage. Winner of the International Union of Architects (UIA) 2023 Golden Cubes Award (Audio Visual Category).

Experiencing the neighbourhood from the perspective of some local pigeons and listening as they explore their dilemma - should they stay or should they go?

Cairo, Egypt Arabic with English Subtitles One of five short films made by young residents of Al Khalifa neighbourhood in Cairo, Egypt. In Fry Day we are told the story of a father who loves to look after the local birds in the neighbourhood and teaches his son to do the same. But when the father dies, will the son be able to follow in his footsteps? Made during the Urban Dreams filmmaking workshop. During their two week mid-year school break in 2023, young residents of the al-Khalifa neighbourhood in historic Cairo. got acquainted with urban wildlife helped by various field visits inside and outside the neighbourhood. The young filmmakers then went on to conceptualise, draft and shoot their short films using their phones, in order to share stories of place that reveal their relationship with Al-Khalifa’s natural and urban heritage. Winner of the International Union of Architects (UIA) 2023 Golden Cubes Award (Audio Visual Category)

Cairo, Egypt Arabic with English Subtitles In City Dreams four of the young filmmakers explain the concepts behind the films they want to make about the relationship between urban and natural heritage Made during the Urban Dreams filmmaking workshop. During their two week mid-year school break in 2023, young residents of the al-Khalifa neighbourhood in historic Cairo. got acquainted with urban wildlife helped by various field visits inside and outside the neighbourhood. The filmmakers then went on to conceptualise, draft and shoot their short films using their phones, in order to share stories of place that reveal their relationship with Al-Khalifa’s natural and urban heritage. Winner of the International Union of Architects (UIA) 2023 Golden Cubes Award (Audio Visual Category)

Assembled from the 16mm bin cuts of a long lost 1978 BBC documentary about the only regulated sail-powered fishery in the UK

Central Victoria Australia, Europe and US Is money responsible for current socio-economic inequities and ecological unsustainability? How might a postcapitalist imaginary address and resolve the socio-economic and political inequities and ecological unsustainabilities of capitalist relations of production based, as they are, on monetary calculations and relations? What might a postcapitalist world without money feel and look like? How might it operate? The film draws on scholarly research to give life to a degrowth, eco-socialist and nonmarket socialist community mode of production of the future. "Film making is generally an expensive and highly technical process, with many (mainly male) collaborators using lots of material and energy in production, marketing and distribution. In line with the content of the film, I chose as simple, easy, at hand and inexpensive ways of proceeding. The whole project except for the soundtrack was made by talented women living within 15 km of where I live. I wanted the film to have a creative flair and be constructive. It needed to be concise and then made as freely available as possible. My findings from screenings in conferences through to small gatherings, indicates that audio-visual communication is a relatively successful way to introduce complicated topics to a range of people and to enable common ground on which to engage with them. At the same time, the simplicity and summary nature of the project has led to certain misconceptions about the sophistications of a community mode of production. Where there is common space for viewers to raise queries with me they can be addressed. In general, employing my film making skills as a form of communication has proved a successful way to convey my ideas and, screened in forums, it has formed common ground on which to discuss really different futures." The filmmakers acknowledge the Dja Dja Wurrung people as the Traditional Owners of the land on which this short film was produced.