Fabulations, Folklores, Futures

Norwegian folklore, dystopian futures, queer breakups, and Hemel Hempstead. This collection of films straddles the realms between reality and imagination, merging fiction and non-fiction in formally refreshing ways. Three figures from regional Norwegian folklore arise from a rural landscape, in a peculiar and playful manner roughly reminiscent of Karel Zeman and Ray Harryhausen. Elsewhere, a future world (represented by the area around the Dead Sea) has regressed to simpler ways of living, and a man must journey far to source fresh water. In present day France, a queer relationship in difficulties is captured tenderly, beautifully. And a portrait of Hemel Hempstead becomes a complex, formally bold study of race, class, and labour in an English ‘new town’, simultaneously a drama, non-fiction, and a rare instance of slow science fiction.

This session will feature a Q&A with Karen Russo, chaired by festival programmer Edward Smyth.

Sinkholes

Karen Russo / 2025 / UK / 18:45

Taking its starting point the rapid drying of the Dead Sea, Sinkholes is a dystopian vision of a world in which water has become scarce. Following the voiceover of its protagonist, the story unfolds through documentary scenes shot in Israel and Palestine. Threading together ideas of entropy and the post-human, Sinkholes is a mediation 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.