STST Film Club X Dream Sequence
Thursday, April 3, 2025 · 7 - 9.30pm GMT
Staffordshire St
49 Staffordshire St London SE15 5TJ
Presenting 10 contemporary experimental short films by 10 exciting and emerging filmmakers from around the world. No theme. No rules. Expect a kaleidoscopic night where different ideas, themes, textures, and filmmaking techniques can collide.
Tickets available here.
I Am Still Here (Sissi Kaplan, Vivian Wang and Cyril Wong, 2020)
Singapore - 11’43”
I Am Still Here is a found footage film that combines materials from an old National Geographic animal documentary with a series of photographic portraits of a woman in a remote landscape. Set in a post-civilisation vista, she lives with dead and living animals, their reproductions, as well as the encroaching planets. Her alienation, solitude, and quest for meaning are juxtaposed with the natural instincts of animals and the invariable trajectories of planets, hinting at a larger system of time and space, gesturing at alternative possibilities for navigating the world. In this visual poem, image, sound, and text release distinct yet interconnected mental and emotional spaces, orbiting each other to form new and incessant constellationsSissi Kaplan is a Hong Kong-based visual artist working with photography, video, and text. Her work focuses on the fictionalisation of the everyday, employing solitude, emptiness and her own performing body to transfigure found situations and reveal hidden aspects of human nature. Her work has been exhibited internationally.
Vivian Wang is a Singapore-based composer, sound artist, and multi-instrumentalist. She is a member of art rock group The Observatory and ambient drone duo ARCN TEMPL.
Cyril Wong is a Singaporean poet and writer known for his emotional and lyrical works that explore themes of identity, love, and human connection. Wong has published several collections, including The Lover's Tongue and Unmarked Treasure, and is recognised as a prominent contemporary voice in Singapore’s literary scene.
The Last Seaport of Limerence (Melody Woodnutt, Crys Cole and James Rushford, 2025)
Australia - 6’11”
A seaport that sits liminally between hope and uncertainty. The two channel 16mm film piece finds a heterotopian quality due to an anachronistic and mirroring approach. The piece collapses Woodnutt’s previous films and her unused film negatives into a new liminality between her body of works. In doing so, a mysterious new ‘topia is found at the sea’s edge.
The work was created in collaboration with the experimental music duo Ora Clementi.
Melody Woodnutt works primarily within the expanded field of 16mm analogue moving image film. Her artworks take form as large-scale immersive installations, expanded cinema, short 16mm films, or printed photographic film stills. Screened internationally, Woodnutt’s work often explores unknowable realms such as the sea, cosmos, or spectral worlds, alongside explorations of intimacy and poetics. She is an active member of Artist Film Workshop: an artist-run initiative and film lab for analogue small-gauge film. Biennially, she is the artistic director of the international film platform and residency, The Weight of Mountains.
Ora Clementi is Canadian sound artist Crys Cole and Australian composer/performer James Rushford. Their work is disorientating and highly performative, utilising vocal mirroring and both electronic and handmade instruments. Their critically acclaimed 2021 album Sylva Sylvarum was released via Black Truffle.
Maspeth is America (Ben Kujawski, 2024)
USA - 6’59”
A semi-fictional working-class lamentation captured on the outskirts of industrial areas in New York City. Photographed in black-and-white Super 8, the film reverberates the sentiments of a worker grinding away another day in a never-ending cycle of generational labour.Ben Kujawski is a New York-based filmmaker, musician, and photographer. Having lived in the American Southwest and on both coasts of the US, his work examines themes of blue-collar life and the American desert as a place of unchecked freedom. Kujawski's work has been exhibited at the Museum of the Moving Image, Pace Gallery, and The Woodstock Film Festival. He is also the co-founder of No Name Cinema in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Mythology of Memory (Justin Brown and Adrian Cousins, 2024)
USA/UK - 6’08”
Mythology of Memory is a collaborative video installation consisting of Cousins’ elegiac home movie alchemy, and Brown’s palimpsestic layering of the footage into a shifting, dreamlike collage.
Justin Brown is a multidisciplinary artist who has been making films for over twenty years. By scavenging and layering found footage, and personal videos, he seeks to evoke a ghost-like sense of nostalgia. Ordinary moments captured by technology are destroyed and then reimagined in an attempt to make them more universally human.
Adrian Cousins shoots Super 8 and 16mm film, hand-processing it using custom chemical techniques. Embracing an intentionally amateur aesthetic, his work focuses on capturing everyday life and fleeting moments, often highlighting minute details illuminated by transient natural light. His approach aligns with Jonas Mekas’ philosophy: “I make home movies - therefore I live. I live - therefore I make home movies.”
Abbaglia e Svanisci (Riccardo Tesorini, 2024)
Italy - 6’08”
VHS tapes are manipulated, distorted, and reinterpreted through the filmmaker’s use of video circuit bending. In doing so, the fragility of personal and collective memory is examined, with the unpredictability of the process often resulting in surprising outcomes. The accompanying soundtrack utilises self-built audio circuits, modular synthesis, and digitally processed aluminium sounds, all shaped by custom algorithms.
Riccardo Tesorini lives and works in Bologna, Italy. His work spans sound design, sound art, and sound installations. As a composer, he has produced music for theatre and soundtracks, as well as his own electro-acoustic project Haou Nebout. His compositions and performances have been presented all over the world, including the United States, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Germany, Austria, Italy, France, United Kingdom, Portugal, Finland, Estonia, and Cyprus.
About Wintering - Parts 1 - 3 (Nina Maria Allmoslechner, 2023 - Ongoing)
Austria/Italy - 2’49” (Part 1) / Austria/Spain - 3’03” (Part 2) / Austria - 4’58” (Part 3)
About Wintering is an ongoing series of shorts that documents periods of retreat and personal reflection for the filmmaker. Each part is released annually and shot entirely on a single roll of Super 8 film. The title of the series references Katherine May’s 2020 bestselling book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.
Part 1 explores Allmoslechner's mental health struggles and loss of sense of time, while Part 2 sees her confronting personal and collective grief during an artist residency in Spain. Finally, in Part 3, she explores her troubled relationship with her body, stemming from the premature puberty she experienced at the age of seven and a half.
Nina Maria Allmoslechner is an Austrian photographer, filmmaker, and visual artist working between London and Tyrol. She works with analogue film formats, and her projects are deeply personal and diaristic, exploring themes such as mental health, womanhood, family, and home. In 2022, she was awarded the DYCP artist grant from Arts Council England, followed by the Goethe Institute project grant in 2023. In 2024, she received the BFI Doc Society film funding award. Her work has been exhibited internationally. Allmoslechner also co-organises Fail Better Talks, a London-based series where artists discuss how their greatest creative failures have helped them learn and grow.
A Life Half-Lived (Rob Munday, 2024)
UK - 7’32”
A propulsive journey through places seen, dreams glimpsed and lives cut short. Within kaleidoscopic loops we find the oppressed and suppressed. From kidnapped Argentinians to pro-democracy campaigners and proponents of socialist body culture. And then the individuals: an astronautical scapegoat, an accidental artist’s muse and the much-studied victim of a botched lobotomy. Time flies by in a whirl of faces, dates and developing structures that build into a lattice of memories that refuse to die.Rob Munday is a London-based animator, director, and writer whose work explores the personal, the subjective, and the peculiarities of everyday life. His short films span various genres, from drama and romance to documentary and comedy. His animations, in particular, are surreal with a unique tactile quality, using a cutout technique that incorporates paper, found photographs, and ink drawings. His work has been screened internationally, with official selections at the BFI London Film Festival and South by Southwest (SXSW).
We Breathe Each Other In and Out of Existence (Archer Boyette, 2021)
USA - 5’25”
A celebration of the magic of plant life. Created using plants harvested in Pisgah National Forest.
The film was originally presented as an installation incorporating 16mm clear leader with adhered botanicals, digitised projections, environmental field recordings, and tree stumps.Archer Boyette is an interdisciplinary artist from Western North Carolina working predominantly in time-based media. Her handmade 16mm films playfully engage with the materiality of celluloid to examine human and other-than-human coexistence, interdependence, and sanctity. Archer received an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University, where she currently works as an instructor and film programmer.
I Have Done It Again (Mor Fleisher Leach, 2023)
USA - 7’32”
A study of identity through language, food, and bandages. An experimental short shot on Super 8 film.
Mor Fleisher Leach is an experimental filmmaker based in Texas, USA. Working exclusively with Super 8 film, her short films have a diaristic quality, often exploring themes of identity and place. Her work also highlights the materiality of film itself, whether through hand-painted scenes or the intentional inclusion of imperfections found on the film strip, such as light burns and scratches. Her most recent work — an installation called Contortions — was exhibited at Austin, Texas' Motion Media Arts Center.
Shape (Sida Wang, 2024)
Australia - 5’36”
Shape is an experimental short film that examines the intricate and often unnoticed conditioning of human life within urban environments. By adopting an observational stance, this project documents the daily ebb and flow of Sydney's city life, capturing fragments of moments that, when pieced together, reveal the subtle ways in which the urban landscape shapes and regulates human behavior.
Sida Wang is a filmmaker currently working between China and Australia. She recently completed a Master's Degree in Social Science and Arts at the University of Sydney. Working with both digital and analogue formats, her work explores posthuman anxieties in the modern world.