STST Film Club #3

03.07.25

Staffordshire St Project Space
Dream Sequence presents an evening of experimental short films by bold, forward-thinking filmmakers from around the world. No theme. No rules. Expect a kaleidoscopic night where ideas, themes, textures and filmmaking techniques can collide.

Programme: 




Glistening Thrills

Jodie Mack, 2013, UK, 8’33 mins

A shiny otherworld of holographic reverie pairs dollar store gift bags and haunting sounds, unfolding an effervescent melancholy in three parts. Featuring compositions for bowed vibraphone by Elliot Cole.




Mechanisms

Ian Andrews, 2024, Australia, 9’18 mins

This experimental film repurposes bleached 16mm prints of vintage hospital fire safety films, transforming them through layers of digital abstraction. Two sets of altered prints—one green-yellow, the other red-yellow—are composited with randomly generated visual masks. The result is a sensorial study in visual decay, control, and transformation.




Lemon With No Siblings

Bea Macdonald, 2024, UK, 5’59 mins

In an intimate portrait of the filmmaker’s grandmother, this short film brings us close to the details, sounds and textures of their exchanges after 10 years apart. However much remains intangible and almost magical, ruminating on time, loss, love and rediscovery.




Potemkin Piece

Justin Clifford Rhody, 2022, USA, 1’35”

A collaborative deconstruction/destruction of a Battleship Potemkin 35mm trailer created with nearly 80 collaborators through the mail during lockdown. Each person was sent half-second long strips of the film to manipulate in any way they wanted. Once returned, the film strips were spliced together in a new sequence creating a chance-driven score from the optical soundtrack. A messy experiment in montage and cut up techniques made by a diverse cast of artists, friends and loved ones.




Summer Heat (( part ii ))

Sam Spreckley, 2017, UK, 5’44 mins

Summer Heat (( part ii )) is an experimental film based around a strange old voyeuristic Mountain Film company production. Through a process of physical distress, the artist intervenes; allowing the film to blister, peel, and tear from the heat of the projector bulb.  Individual frames are manipulated and then restructured digitally.  Finally in a sort of hypo-manic sonic investigation every little movement is given some unique sound.




Kosmos

Thorsten Fleisch, 2004, Germany, 5’26 mins

Crystals grown on 16mm film. Mystical qualities shine straight to the screen. Unfiltered, only aided by light which gracefully breaks its rays into rich visual textures.




Serial Parallels

Max Hattler, 2019, Hong Kong, 9’00 mins

This experimental animation by Max Hattler approaches Hong Kong’s built environment from the conceptual perspective of celluloid film, by applying the technique of film animation to the photographic image. The city’s signature architecture of horizon-eclipsing housing estates is reimagined as parallel rows of film strips: Serial Parallels.




The Primal Wound

Carolin Meyer, 2024, UK - 2’18 mins

The Primal Wound is a poetic meditation on the foundational loss experienced through separation, particularly in the context of adoption. Through visceral imagery and layered sound, the film explores the transformation of the mother into the Other, the birth of desire from absence, and the enduring search for belonging.

A full artist’s statement on this work can be found here.




Death Tape

Matt McKinzie, 2025, USA, 4’30 mins

A nature study filmed on Super 8mm, in which the filmmaker encounters something unexpected and even a bit sinister.




Words of Water

Ellie Borzilleri, 2024, USA, 4’30 mins

A short 16mm exploration on the ephemeral ways movement and direction interact, contrast, and fight one another within the frame. Words of Water uses water as a physical tool of representation for the structures that bind our existence and the transient motions of life.