Elysium gallery is premiering four days of experimental short films created by artists from all over the world. The films are all are under 10 mins in length and have been made in the last year (2019/2020), with many created during the COVID-19 lockdown. All will premiere at 7pm on the ‘elysium gallery TV’ YouTube channel (for subscribers) and all its social media outlets.
The Swansea gallery, which has been closed throughout the pandemic, is also reopening its doors to visitors on Wednesday August 5. There were more than 300 entries for the film festival and the elysium director Jonathan Powell said he was hugely impressed by the entries.
“This has been out first film event for nearly 10 years and now felt like a good time to explore through film what people had been up to before and during the COVID-19 lockdown. There were plenty of entrants that conveyed the difficulties people were going through these past 12 months… but I think you will find from this selection a lot of humour, love and hope that people still have, and an ability to find ways of working together despite the barriers sometimes put in their way.”
Filmmakers featured include Lily Dean, a sculptor and filmmaker and Central Saint Martins’ graduate whose work Joy Land is based on traditional Punch and Judy shows exploring themes of political satire, toxic masculinity, and humour in the grotesque.
Deirdre Mulrooney is a writer, filmmaker, radio documentary maker and dance historian whose film stars Harry Potter’s Luna Lovegood actress Evanna Lynch who emulates Lucia’s magical dance as captured by photographer Berenice Abbott in her iconic 1928 image of the promising young dancer in transformative silver fish costume, inspired by a little-known link with WB Yeats.
There is also work from Svetlana Ochkovskaya who explores the New Reality of Life Under Lockdown and multidisciplinary artist Izaak Brandt, who works in the mediums of dance, sculpture, performance, film-making and drawing, who also explores the lockdown, highlighting 52 dancers from all over the world in isolation but also in unity.
Gisela Ferreira presents Now Moving Into, a short dance film created during social distancing which brings together the monotony of domestic life, a longing for touch and the feeling of overwhelmingness created by the huge amount of media info surrounding the pandemic while INTERLINKING Collective also takes inspiration from the Coronavirus crisis and lockdown and looks at how international dancers connected online. The dancers were asked to interpret the Morse code of their cities in Interlinking Year: 2020.
Sean Smuda’s The Berlin Coronnale also looks at the psycho-spatial effects of Covid-19 isolation, where one can go in public and what possible directions the world holds.
Other themes are also explored over the four-day festival with photography graduate Emily Peacock creating an uncanny and surreal world, one constructed through a fetishist obsession with food in her film Fish Dinner.
The film festival’s timetable of events:
Weds 12th:
Lily Dean/ Shir Handelsman/ Alexander Iasenko/ Deirdre Mulrooney/ Behnaz Fahari
Thurs 13th:
Tracy Satchwill/ Svetlana Ochkovskaya/ RV & Oliver Tida Tida/ Izaak Brandt/ Diamond Frances/ Finn Rabbitt Dove
Fri 14th:
Emily Peacock/ Cointeen Trash/ Gisela Ferreira/ Nirit Rechavi/ Zhang Ruiqi/ Kieron Da Silva Beckerton
Sat 15th:
INTERLINKING Collective / Julia Keenan/ Sean Smuda/ Javier Velazquez/ Mitja Zupanc/ Jack Thomson
For more information about the artists, films and gallery opening, head to www.elysumgallery.com.
For more information, contact Rachel Mainwaring rach@mainwrites.co.uk/ 07803 147224
