Fri 28 & Sat 29 March 2025
at the Mean Ole Scene shop unit (as was)
Oastler Market
at the Mean Ole Scene shop unit (as was)
Oastler Market
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A two-day celebration of artists' filmic responses to the Land Rights & Climate Action movements. Featuring experimental and artists’ films from home and abroad. An intimate & unique cinematic experience, this bicycle-powered cinema event will be 100% human powered. Come along and help power the show, or just sit back and enjoy the film! |
The programme, curated by Ian Nesbitt of Out.Side.Film, looks at how artists' respond to the landscape in film, in particular speculating on how deepening relationships with the living world might offer new and re-emergent ancient perspectives, even in places where lineage has been severed and land ruined. |
Strictly limited capacity, booking essential.
Book your seat here: eventbrite.com
Secure bicycle parking in the venue - please specify when booking if you require a space.
Free popcorn for all cyclists!
Book your seat here: eventbrite.com
Secure bicycle parking in the venue - please specify when booking if you require a space.
Free popcorn for all cyclists!
programme:
Friday:
Philip Trevelyan The Moon and the Sledgehammer Philip Trevelyan’s acclaimed cult classic, now an astonishing 50 years old, opens the festival. It features a real family, the Pages, who for generations have lived in their isolated off-grid homestead deep in a Sussex woodland, the forgotten remnants of a once-thriving rural community left behind by progress, whose independent life is free of MSM, bank managers and clocks, but out of kilter with time and societal norms. It offers a glimpse into their self-constructed albeit unusual universe where they have formed their own philosophies about the world around them. There, in their woodland paradise and being part of the Nature they inhabit, they believe the world has followed the wrong path. Director Philip Trevelyan said he wanted to record them because: “I found them freer than most people. They had found a way of enjoying life and I wanted to capture that”. Presented like a cinematic poem, there is nothing overtly political about the film. By the end, modern lifestyle pressures, stresses and consumer traps are left far behind as values are challenged like never before. |
Saturday:
Jumana Manna Foragers Foragers depicts the dramas around the practice of foraging for wild edible plants in Palestine/Israel with wry humour and a meditative pace. Shot in the Golan Heights, the Galilee and Jerusalem, it employs fiction, documentary and archival footage to portray the impact of Israeli nature protection laws on these customs. The restrictions prohibit the collection of the artichoke-like ’akkoub and za’atar (thyme), and have resulted in fines and trials for hundreds caught collecting these native plants. For Palestinians, these laws constitute an ecological veil for legislation that further disposses them from their land while the occupation's state representatives insist on their scientific expertise and duty to protect. Following the plants from the wild to the kitchen, from the chases between the foragers and the nature patrol, to courtroom defences, Foragers captures the joy and knowledge embodied in these traditions alongside their resilience to the prohibitive law. By reframing the terms and constraints of preservation, the film raises questions around the politics of extinction, namely who determines what is made extinct and what gets to live on. |
Shorts (Friday + Saturday)
Derek Jarman
A Journey to Avebury
A short experimental Super 8 film made by Jarman in 1971, it charts a walking journey he made through the Wiltshire landscape to the Neolithic stones at Avebury.
A Journey to Avebury
A short experimental Super 8 film made by Jarman in 1971, it charts a walking journey he made through the Wiltshire landscape to the Neolithic stones at Avebury.
Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah
And still, it remains
This new film explores race and environmental legacies of colonialism, the ongoing impact of French toxic colonialism in Mertoutek, a village nestled in the Hoggar Mountains of Algeria’s Southern Sahara and a home to the Escamaran community of Black Algerians. Used as a testing ground for nuclear bombs by the French between 1961 and 1966, the area continues to suffer the consequences of radioactive fallout circulating in the water and soil.
And still, it remains
This new film explores race and environmental legacies of colonialism, the ongoing impact of French toxic colonialism in Mertoutek, a village nestled in the Hoggar Mountains of Algeria’s Southern Sahara and a home to the Escamaran community of Black Algerians. Used as a testing ground for nuclear bombs by the French between 1961 and 1966, the area continues to suffer the consequences of radioactive fallout circulating in the water and soil.
Esther May Campbell
Anything moving
Take Care. Look Out. Hold Tight…. then forwards into novelty. The trees have created the conditions for this existence. We all need water.
In the woods, Esther told stories of human, spirit and animal-kin. The kids played make-believe and tied camera traps to trees and rocks and waited like Foxes, watching with Eagle Eyes and listening with Deer Ears. They recorded sounds of wind and trees and laughter. After a year, Esther collaged their findings into 3 audio visual pieces that shatter the boundaries between worlds.
Anything moving
Take Care. Look Out. Hold Tight…. then forwards into novelty. The trees have created the conditions for this existence. We all need water.
In the woods, Esther told stories of human, spirit and animal-kin. The kids played make-believe and tied camera traps to trees and rocks and waited like Foxes, watching with Eagle Eyes and listening with Deer Ears. They recorded sounds of wind and trees and laughter. After a year, Esther collaged their findings into 3 audio visual pieces that shatter the boundaries between worlds.
Ian Nesbitt
Settlers In England
'Settlers in England' is a collaborative social history of the Oxcroft Land Settlement near Bolsover, high on a hill in the North-East corner of Derbyshire. Between 1934 and 1939, the Land Settlement Association (LSA) established 1,100 smallholdings within 26 settlements across the country, the objective of which was to re-settle unemployed workers and their families (mainly miners at Oxcroft) and get them working and producing on the land. The Oxcroft settlement was comprised of 40 plots, each of which was made up of a semi-detached cottage and 5 acres of land, including a piggery and greenhouses.
The film examines ideas of food production, environment and community through the eyes of current residents, some of whom moved onto the estate at its inception in 1936 as the children of original settlers and have never left.
It takes its title from a book written by Fred Kitchen and published in 1947 about his time living as a tenant farmer and market gardener on the Oxcroft Estate.
Settlers In England
'Settlers in England' is a collaborative social history of the Oxcroft Land Settlement near Bolsover, high on a hill in the North-East corner of Derbyshire. Between 1934 and 1939, the Land Settlement Association (LSA) established 1,100 smallholdings within 26 settlements across the country, the objective of which was to re-settle unemployed workers and their families (mainly miners at Oxcroft) and get them working and producing on the land. The Oxcroft settlement was comprised of 40 plots, each of which was made up of a semi-detached cottage and 5 acres of land, including a piggery and greenhouses.
The film examines ideas of food production, environment and community through the eyes of current residents, some of whom moved onto the estate at its inception in 1936 as the children of original settlers and have never left.
It takes its title from a book written by Fred Kitchen and published in 1947 about his time living as a tenant farmer and market gardener on the Oxcroft Estate.
Mars Saude
Some Things We Tended
Some Things We Tended explores the future of food production in a changing climate through documentation of two sites in mid Wales: an automated research greenhouse and a small-scale organic market garden. These settings lead to a miniature excursion into a speculative future rooted in Welsh soil.
Some Things We Tended
Some Things We Tended explores the future of food production in a changing climate through documentation of two sites in mid Wales: an automated research greenhouse and a small-scale organic market garden. These settings lead to a miniature excursion into a speculative future rooted in Welsh soil.
Ian Nesbitt
Catalogue
'Catalogue' is an S.O.S message in the process of digitally erasing itself, sent by an unknown wanderer from a questionably real or virtual future. The film relocates Paolo Colline's poem of the same name into a post-human botanical garden, via electronically degraded and corrupted found footage, surveyed at eye-level, also making use of found recordings of young people discussing an unnamed future celestial event.'
Catalogue
'Catalogue' is an S.O.S message in the process of digitally erasing itself, sent by an unknown wanderer from a questionably real or virtual future. The film relocates Paolo Colline's poem of the same name into a post-human botanical garden, via electronically degraded and corrupted found footage, surveyed at eye-level, also making use of found recordings of young people discussing an unnamed future celestial event.'
This project is funded by the UK government through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.
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