When nothing less than freedom is at stake, who has the right to speak? Two films concerned with the politics and poetics of language in public life, and how we might bend it to shape our individual and collective selves towards liberation.
Louis and Languages – With an atmosphere of gentle psychedelia reminiscent of the haunted melancholia of James Leyland Kerby’s Caretaker project, Froment sculpts an uncanny fantasia exploring the linguistic construction of identity, inspired by Louis Wolfson’s Le Schizo et Les Langues. Through curious interpolations of sound, text and image he traces the idiosyncratic practices of translation as they develop in the mind of Louis, a young man treated for schizophrenia.
History of the Present – An experimental feminist opera-film about class and conflict, History of the Present has been made collaboratively by Maria Fusco and Margaret Salmon, featuring new compositions by Annea Lockwood, libretto by Maria Fusco and improvisational vocal work by Héloïse Werner. This intersectional, intergenerational feminist work layers sociological, cultural, and political themes from the recent history of Northern Ireland, foregrounding working-class women’s voices to ask: who has the right to speak, and in what way?
Louis and Languages | Dir. Aurélien Froment | United Kingdom | 2023 | 22m | French, English, Spanish, Yiddish with English subtitles
History of the Present | Dirs. Margaret Salmon, Maria Fusco | United Kingdom | 2023 | 46m | English