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Mascara Film Club presents a trio of interrelated films by artists Beatrice Gibson, Ana Vaz, and Basma al-Sharif. Kaleidoscopic, non-linear, and open-ended in form, these works explore feminist approaches to literature, pedagogy, and the lingering spectres of colonialism and fascism.
Orbiting a shared constellation of sensibilities and formal strategies, the films also reflect a real-life network of collaboration and friendship, with both Vaz and al-Sharif appearing as contributors in Gibson’s film. Here, experimental feminist filmmaking becomes both a practice of situatedness and speculation, a sensory and relational encounter loaded with possibility and limitation.
Anchoring the programme, Beatrice Gibson’s Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs [Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters] is based on a screenplay by Gertrude Stein written in 1929 as European fascism was building momentum. Set almost a century later in contemporary Paris, Gibson deploys Stein’s script as a talismanic guide through a contemporary moment of comparable social and political unrest. Featuring an ensemble of the artist’s friends and influences – including poet Alice Notley and educator Diocouda Diaoune – the film plays on Stein's interest in autobiography and repetition. An exploration of inheritance, responsibility, ethics and futurity, Deux soeurs is simultaneously an abstract thriller and a collective portrait. The film is shot on 16mm anamorphic by the artist’s friend and fellow filmmaker Ben Rivers and features an original soundtrack by composer Laurence Crane.
Ana Vaz’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird takes its title from the poem by Wallace Stevens. Composed of a series of attempts of looking and being looked at, the film originates from a commission from Lisbon's Galerias Municipais and the educational outreach program Descola (Unschool). A kaleidoscope of experiences, questions, and wonders encountered by a couple of high school students, who – over a period of one year and together with filmmaker Ana Vaz – questioned what cinema can be. Here, the camera becomes an instrument of inquiry, a pencil, a song. ‘The film is a song you can see’, wrote one of the students in a collective constellation of phrases and drawings made during one of the workshops. The phrase is a perfect description of a film that explores a nascent ecology of the senses.
Basma al-Sharif’s Deep Sleep was made during a period of temporarily restricted travel to the Gaza Strip, when the artist undertook the study and practice of autohypnosis with the purpose of bi-locating into multiple places at once. Paired with field recordings rendered into a binaural beat soundtrack, Deep Sleep is made up of a year’s worth of bi-location sessions recorded onto Super8mm film. The result is a movement through the ruins of ancient civilizations as embedded in modern civilization-in-ruins. Deep Sleep draws from the historical avant-garde cinema to produce an invitation to move through landscapes and transcend geographical borders in a collective act that discards memory in exchange for a visceral present.
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Programme:
Basma al-Sharif, Deep Sleep, 2014 (13 mins)
Ana Vaz,13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, 2020 (31 mins)
Beatrice Gibson, Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs, 2019 (22 mins)
About Mascara Film Club
Mascara Film Club is an artist-run film club, which mostly takes place in North-East London. Taking place outside both film festival circuits and institutional art spaces, we screen artists’ moving image in more convivial contexts. We understand film screenings defined less as the relation between film and spectators in hushed rooms, but rather as performative and social events where the critical intimacies of friendship and community can come to the fore. Through our programming we seek to bring into conversation films and people, and foster a self-organised infrastructure for moving image practitioners.
About New Unity
The Newington Green Meeting House is the home of New Unity, a radically inclusive community of love and justice. This event is a partnership event, with space offered by New Unity's arts programme Arts on the Green. Arts on the Green exists to provide flexible space to arts practitioners bringing high quality culture to our community.
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For any specific accessibility requirements or for any queries, please email: arts@new-unity.org.