Deptford Film Club #4
Deptford Film Club is a regular monthly event organised by Empathy & Risk and Looking Forward in partnership. Join us for the fourth instalment featuring videos by Yamile Calderon, Jesse Roth and Blue Ren.
18 March 2022, 6pm
Empathy & Risk, 1 Borthwick Street, London SE8 3GH
6.15 pm
Yamile Calderon
Domestic at Large
Calderon's film approaches the drug trafficking problem in Colombia from a grounded, personal, and domestic perspective. The project is deeply connected to Calderon's experience of growing up in Colombia when the era of narcotraffic dealing was at its prime. The images that feature in the film are taken by Calderon herself - they frame the still scenes of mafia properties that have since been seized by the government.
"These images reveal ambivalence between the decadent, luxuriance in contrast with the emptiness of the houses. At the same time there is a confrontation between the way media presents this phenomena and how these photographs approach the everyday life of these people with their families, telling stories through the traces of people."
6.30 pm
Jesse Roth
Escape Artist: The Highs and Lows of Chris Dobrowolski
The film explores Chris Dobrowolski's playful, on purpose aesthetically rough, yet deeply poetic work.
With a DIY aesthetics, Chris mixes real and unreal and creates Kafkaesque imaginaries and paradoxes that reinterpret with unpolished romanticism history, ideologies, capitalism, and daily life. Among his many adventures, he built a boat from driftwood found by the river Humber to scape art college in Hull; made (and flew) an aeroplane from tea chests and newspaper; made (and rode on) a sledge made from gold picture frames in the Antarctic; and repaired his family’s Triumph Herald Estate to drive from Essex to Rome, where his father served during World War 2.
7.10 pm
Blue-Ren Marcus
Nu-Vu
This film pokes at the holes of a stagnant and objective reality, framed within the context of the strange hyperbole that is America. Through the subversion of the archetypal American road trip film, this work reveals an existential quality. Highlighted by the character’s perpetual motion, the film is a futile quest for meaning and substance.
'Nu-Vu' is filmed with a meditative stillness and has a pensive and provoking narration throughout. The daydream-like cinematography follows a protagonist is in a constant state of moving - though they possess an overall sense of calm, the continuous motions and movements seem to be initiated by a restlessness. The narrator contributes to this, as their words follow the protagonist and discuss themes of change and permanence, silence and stillness.
There is a frustration with stillness and being fixed, and the protagonist travels ceaselessly without a chosen destination in mind to control time and to avoid fixity. However, the narrator concedes that the comfort of a moving car can only provide temporary relief.
Covid-19 Note:
Everyone attending the event will be required to demonstrate either proof of double vaccination (2 weeks or greater) or proof of a recent negative test result (within 36 hours). This is a requirement of entry.