the story of my death as told to me by another : STRANGE LOVE CINEMA (2020)

https://www.strangelovefestival.com/cinema

MONDAY JUNE 29 – SUNDAY JULY 5 2020
David Austen Sarah Beddington
Oona Grimes Andrew Kötting Joel Snowman

The final category that concludes part one of Strangelove Online, takes a look at Cinema. In the previous sections, Documentary, Animation, Video Art and Experimental Film, we have focused on different strands of what is referred to as time-based media. In these last five weeks, we have focused particularly on the moving image. In the following months we will explore music and performance.

For this selection, we have chosen five films that make use of story telling in different ways. Andrew Kötting and Sarah Beddington tell their stories against the backdrop of landscape. Each film explores narration as a tool to reveal the story. In Kötting, we see a world emptied of life, set in a bleak, Beckett-like landscape. Beddington’s film explores the relationship between place and people, taking a poem about birds to drive the narrative.

In the work of David Austen, the focus is on a comic corpse, a story which also tips a hat to Beckett. Austen is a picture maker and the work plays with the idea of a still life, nature morte. Oona Grimes, also a visual artist, employs simple animation, a kind of post-storyboard revealing how memory, plays an important role in how we understand film.

Finally the work of Joel Snowman, who describes himself as a skateboarder/director, Whiskey Lemonade is a gentle and pragmatic observation about his hometown of Folkestone. Using a documentary format he records the changing and developing urban town scape and the people who occupy the streets and beaches.