STST Film Club X Dream Sequence #3
Thursday, Jul 3, 2025 · 7 - 9.30pm GMT
Staffordshire St
49 Staffordshire St London SE15 5TJ
Dream Sequence presents an evening of experimental short films by bold and forward-thinking filmmakers from around the world. No theme. No rules. Expect a kaleidoscopic night where ideas, themes, textures and filmmaking techniques collide.
Tickets available here.
Glistening Thrills (Jodie Mack, 2013)
UK - 8’33”
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.
Jodie Mack is a UK-based experimental animator and Professor of Animation at Dartmouth College. Her films unleash the kinetic energy of material remnants of domestic and institutional knowledge to illuminate the relationship between decoration and utility. Straddling the boundary between rigor and accessibility, her cinema questions how we ascribe value to things.
Mack's 16mm films have screened at a variety of venues including the Locarno Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the Jeonju International Film Festival, and the Viennale.
Serial Parallels (Max Hattler, 2019)
Hong Kong - 9’00”
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.
Max Hattler is a German media artist working primarily with animation and audiovisual performance. His work explores the relationships between abstraction and figuration, aesthetics and politics, sound and image, precision and improvisation. His short films and video installations have been presented internationally at museums and galleries. Hattler holds a doctorate in fine art from the University of East London (2014) and is an associate professor at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.
Kosmos (Thorsten Fleisch, 2004)
Germany - 5’26”
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.
Thorsten Fleisch is a Germany-based experimental filmmaker whose often cameraless work explores the materiality of cinema through direct engagement with the celluloid filmstrip. His films have been screened at festivals worldwide. Shortly after completing his studies at the Städelschule, he made Blutrausch / Bloodlust, for which he won the Ann Arbor Film Co-op Award. He has been commissioned to create work by Red Bull, Gaspar Noé, Basement Jaxx, and the Prenzlauer Berlinale. Fleisch has also served as a jury member for the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Vienna Shorts, and Punto y Raya.
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.
Justin Clifford Rhody artist and curator based in New Mexico, USA. His work—spanning film, photography, and sound—has been exhibited widely across the U.S. Rhody is the co-founder of No Name, a microcinema, gallery, and community space in Santa Fe dedicated to showcasing international and local experimental, avant-garde, and repertory films, videos, and visual art. He also runs Physical, an independent record label that has released several records by K / S / R, the free-improv band he is part of alongside frequent collaborators Ben Kujawski and Abigail Smith.
Death Tape (Matt McKinzie, 2025)
USA - 4’30”
A nature study filmed on Super 8mm, in which the filmmaker encounters something unexpected and even a bit sinister.
Matt McKinzie is a multimedia artist whose work encompasses writing, filmmaking, curation, archival research, and performance. His films have screened at MIX: The New York Queer Experimental Film Festival, Wicked Queer: The Boston LGBTQ+ Film Festival, 8-Ball TV, Film Diary NYC, and the Film-Makers' Cooperative, where he currently works as Artist Liaison. McKinzie has researched and curated programs of film and video art that have screened in the U.S. and internationally at such venues as Spectacle Theater (New York), Millennium Film Workshop (New York), Mana Contemporary (New Jersey), and Cinema Catalunya (Terrassa, Spain). In 2022, Matt was named a ScreenCraft and WeScreenplay Finalist.
Summer Heat (( part ii )) (Sam Spreckley, 2017)
UK - 5’44”
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.
Sam Spreckley is a Scottish video, film, and sound artist. While his practice spans filmmaking, sound design, illustration, and graphic design, his recent work focuses on found 8mm/Super 8 film and collage-based explorations. Spreckley’s work has been exhibited at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Aberdeen Art Gallery, as well as internationally in Mexico, the United States, Germany, Italy, and Japan.
Lemon With No Siblings (Bea MacDonald, 2024)
UK - 5’59”
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.
Bea MacDonald is a London based artist. Her work weaves together documentary and poetry, reflecting on memory, mythology and place. She works predominantly with analogue film, and this has led to commissions from Deptford-X and Sinema Transtopia. She also runs a workshop series called ‘Analogue Dreamscapes,’ which explores dreaming as a form of inner political resistance.
The Primal Wound (Carolin Meyer, 2024)
UK - 2’18”
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.
Carolin Meyer is a London-based interdisciplinary artist and DJ whose work explores (dis)embodiment through multisensory interventions spanning video, sculpture, sound, writing, and performance. Informed by her transracial adoption (Kurdish Yazidi to German), she engages with themes of identity, racialisation, techno-social transformation, and de-anthropocentrism.
Her work has been published in The Sociological Review, Still Point Journal, Vernacular Journal, and Protein. In 2023, she was appointed a Creative Fellow at UCL, where she explored music as research. She is an Acme studio holder and part of the 2025 cohort at School of the Damned.
Mechanisms (Ian Andrews, 2024)
Asutralia - 9’18”
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.
Dr. Ian Andrews is a Sydney-based media artist and theorist whose work spans generative sound, video, and text, often presented in installation formats. His practice is informed by research interests in aesthetics, philosophy, sound, media theory, and contemporary art, with a particular focus on post-aesthetic approaches and practice-led research. Andrews has exhibited internationally at festivals and institutions in Edinburgh, Rotterdam, Berlin, Hong Kong, São Paulo, and Helsinki, as well as widely across Australia. In 2001, he presented a retrospective of his work, spanning 1983 to 2000, as part of the Sydney Film Festival.
A
UK - 1’46”
Sharon Anatole is a visual anthropologist who unpicks the dense interconnections between technology and identity. Through video works that queer 'content', she draws attention to our often ignored positionality online.