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The session will feature a Q&A with xxx, chaired by festival programmer Edward Smyth.

Sinkholes

Karen Russo / 2025 / UK / 18:45

Merging documentary and fiction, Sinkholes is a dystopian vision of a future world where rain has ceased and water is scarce. The inhabitants of a desolate coastline are trapped between a desertified interior and an unnamed coast. Here, Lawrence must make a final journey from the salt-drowned Sinkhole ridden shores of his human settlement, to a hoped-for source of fresh water inland. Told in his voice-over, the story unfolds through a sequence of documentary scenes, shot around the Dead Sea in Israel and Palestine. While the landscapes and sites are real – the narration transforms these into the ruins of an entire doomed society. Sinkholes imagines a moment in which time has come to a standstill, technology has devolved to simpler forms and the planet itself has regressed to inorganic and mineralogical processes. Threading together references to a history of artists fascinated by ideas of entropy and the post-human – from JG Ballard to Robert Smithson – Sinkholes is a disturbing and visually haunting mediation on what makes us human; on our desire both for survival and resignation in the face of the possibility of extinction.

Hemel

Danielle Adobi Dean / 2024 / UK / 29:44

This portrait of Hemel Hempstead unfolds as a personal essay on the town’s history as a planned community under the New Towns Act of 1946. Titled Hemel, the work’s central reference is a 1957 sci-fi horror B-movie shot in town about the arrival of a non-human entity that infiltrates the minds of residents and endangers life with a toxic black slime. Playing a composite character based on herself and the movie’s detective protagonist, Dean brings together real and imagined worlds, both past and present. Hemel blurs fiction and documentary to expand a critical reading of the colonial overtones in the original movie, while recasting its visual language to consider the race, class, and labour dynamics of a small English town in the post-Brexit context.

Heartbroken for Good

Camille Simon Baudry / 2025 / France / 8:53

As the relationship with her girlfriend frays at the edges, Mimi tries to apprehend the symptoms of an impending breakup.