Directing
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Sarah Turner's film is a ghost story that explores what we forget and how we remember. The stunning imagery comes solely from the window of the Trans-Siberian train, shot first in 1987-8 and then again in 2007-8. The re-enactment of the journey is a memory work, a re-enactment of the past in the present through the process of filming. But the return journey is haunted by the voices of two dead friends that dominate the soundscape of the 'archive' footage.
Re-mixes and extends Perestroika (2009) into two sequences. Sequence one constritutes the 2009 version, while the second sequence constructs a new framing narrative that reinterprets and reconfigures both the imagery and the experience of the first. Part psycho-geography, part dream and part environmental allegory.
A difficult night out sparks a traumatic memory for a woman whose way out is to ritualistically harm, then fix herself. Intercutting the two states of the protagonist's psyche, rich golden sweeps from the past begin to bleed into the reds and blues of the film's present.
London Birds... evokes the shifting mental states of a streetwise, 15 year old girl. The film explores the impact of her surprise sexual awakening: a moment of rejection that's bad enough to make her run and keep running.
Experimental short film by Sarah Turner.
The film opens directly and freshly with a screen journey which is also a kinetic light sculpture holding its rotation steadily before our eyes. Many associations emerge as we hear the tale in relation to this image and its shifting background. . . including a bicycle being ridden by the filmmaker, spools and spokes, a feeling of a metal insect or iridescent whirring dragonfly picking up the passing colours. There is a still centre to the radial motion against linear road or landscape. A feeling of cyclical storytelling comes with the account of her own life and giving birth to a ‘computer literate and perfectly bilingual’ baby daughter. We are led to respond to her not being guaranteed to stay in control. Again multiple strands are knotted in this fortune wheel: gain on the swings, lose on roundabouts, with no ‘perfection’ in relations with other beings on the round of merry, or social, or just plain recurring intercourse. -Sandra Lahire
Experimental exploration of The Ivy House pub in Peckham, which was sold to developers as part of the gentrification of South London.