Connections, Contrasts & Curation: An Evening Recap of MicroActs presents Intimate Histories
Join Liberty Antonia Sadler to dive deeper into the themes & curation process of our May screening 'Intimate Histories' at FOMO House + hear all about our new open call for our next September event!
Welcome back to the MicroActs newsletter! In this edition, join me, MicroActs founder Liberty, for some curation thoughts from the last MicroActs screening, 'Intimate Histories', held on 29th May 2025 at FOMO House, a filmmaker clubhouse just off Brick Lane, London. Once again, I had a wonderful experience working with Jhenelle & Akinna, the other members of the MicroActs team, creating this screening of short artist films, and wanted to further unpack some of the themes explored in the films & process of curating the work.
Connections, Contrasts & Curation: An Evening Recap of MicroActs presents Intimate Histories
29th May 2025 at FOMO House, E2, London
On a sunny evening in East London, the MicroActs team & I brought our artist film night back to the fantastic venue FOMO House in London's vibrant borough of Shoreditch. We were delighted to welcome a full house for a diverse collection of moving image works, with 21 films from Belgium, Canada, China, Iran, Libya, Poland, Romania, Spain, UK & USA, ready to surprise & inspire. It is exciting to share with you the topics & energy of the screening ‘Intimate Histories’, and to further explore the connections that weave the films together. This article begins by looking at the themes in a wider overall context, then breaking down the curation decisions & running order in more detail.
We had a fantastic variety of filmmaking methodologies to share at this edition, such as artists giving themselves unique parameters to work with, like Cally Trench’s ‘A Year of Hands’. This playful super-short was created from 366 ink drawings of her own hands, drawn every day for one hour, life-size, from life & using both hands. An intimate self portrait, animated over an extensive period of a year, with such dedication & exuberance.
Attendees entered the venue to the installation film ‘Monument’ by Jeremy Drummond, a colourful overlayed meditation using digital & analogue film to explore protest & collective resistance. We started the first part of the short film programme with Fanxi Sun’s energetic analogue journey ‘I kept following until I realized what was true’ to lead us into the evening’s selection, full of rhythmic quick cuts & dynamic urgency. It is so enjoyable to see how filmmakers find innovative new ways to work with traditional film techniques, such as celebrating Super 8/16mm or breathing new life into antique processes that are almost obsolete. These ideas would be explored later on in the evening when we saw Britany Gunderson playfully cutting up, collating & manipulating film strips in ‘Night Collections #1’, and Arielle Estrada would combine a myriad of media in her film ‘Pellicŭla’, utilising 16mm, Super 8, VHS, MiniDV, and digital film to create a tactile exploration of the surface of the skin, and the intimacy of the lens. Using antique media, Katina Bitsicas & Scott McMahon created ethereal portraits in ‘Cellulose Documents: Forget Me Not’ by layering found nitrate film negatives from the 1930s with microscopic examinations of botanic material; traces of life captured on plastics.
Several films in this edition explored unconventional filmmaking materiality, with the very substance of the frames interwoven with the story of the work. Brandon Christopher Saunders’s work ‘Blouse and Skirt’, was created using fabric scanned as animation frames to explore the trauma of racial oppression as well as survival & freedom, inspired by Christina Sharpe’s ‘In the Wake: On Blackness and Being’. While Francesco Coppola used agar seaweed & pomegranate juice to create ‘Enter Asunder’, a stop-motion performance film exploring masculinity/femininity & identity, with frames printed onto the organic materials whose natural decay created depth & texture. The second half of the night opened with Yasmine Djedje-Fisher-Azoume’s animation ‘Dédé (Ancestor)’ which incorporated use of copper to stunning effect, mixing textural chalk mark making with the shining metal to create a beautiful exploration of the female figure in West African sculpture & diasporic identity.
As part of our installation film section of programme, we also showed Mayar Mahfoud’s ‘I miss you, i don’t want to forget you توحشتك, مانبيش ننساك’, a moving image & tapestry work that archives memories of Libyan people no longer living in their homeland, through personal storytelling & family photographs/home videos. It was an absolute pleasure to see Mayar’s embroidered works hanging in the venue alongside the moving image, bringing the frames of the film into the space.
The concept of home and how we interact with our private personal spaces was woven into many of the films we shared, including Eva Sbaraini’s ‘In Reverie with Trev Flash’, a hypnotic 3D digital rendering portrait of queer musician, poet & LGBTQ+ homeless advocate Trev Flash in their home; highlighting small objects & keepsakes that share their personality & journey. Home can be a complex space, a place of tangled memories & expectations, as explored in Soyeon Jung’s ‘Incubating Home’. Using layers of spoken word & dissolving imagery, Jung creates echoes & fractures to explore themes of inherited tradition, Korean social structures & shifting cultural landscape. A sense of longing for a suppressed element of cultural heritage was beautifully observed in the dance film ‘REESHEH’ by Mahshid Alavi, sharing an emotional connection to dance in Iran, where the art form has been prohibited. This work’s use of movement, rhythm & animated elements create a feeling of reverie & resistance that is truly entrancing.
Our other dance film of the evening was Polish filmmaker Jagoda Turlik’s ‘Niebościan. Freedom lives in a head.’, which questioned the nature of freedom, both from an internal perspective and in relation to the spaces we inhabit. The two performers interact with each other & the architecture in back-and-forth exchange to explore how liberation might be found within. The idea of sanctuary was also key to ‘On Hannah Fields’ by Lewis Heriz, a multimedia micro documentary that used film, phytograms & animation to create a poetic portrait of a community allotment in Derbyshire. Just as nature can heal, nature can also decay, and in Christine Banna’s ‘Retreat Into the Swamp’, we were invited into the secret world of a decomposing tree stump, using 3D rendering, hand drawn animation & digital video to share its journey across multiple seasons as it descends into the green marshes.
The concept that a place might might speak to us, contain memories, hold energies, was explored in diverse & experimental ways throughout the screening, such as the psychogeography of Katia Hiver’s film 'Memories I Keep Unearthing’. It felt very fitting to show this work in the heart of Shoreditch, as the film explores the transformation of London’s East End, layering Super8, video, film, & digital photography to explore how an area changes, the history of people who built it, and the voices forgotten in the passing of time. The phantasmic quality of Cyan Cheng, Chen Zhan & Mengfan Wang’s ‘The Hall’, also brought this idea to the screening, sharing the story of an abandoned People’s Commune Assembly Hall in the village of Shigushan, China. This place, once a central meeting place for the local residents during the era of China’s national collectivisation, is now silent; the film uses spatial projection & hanging fabric to give glimpses into the space’s bustling & complex past.
Alongside works of a personal & political nature, there’s always room for a bit of the absurd at a MicroActs screening, and we had some treats lined up including Alex Pearl’s glitch-tastic short ‘Incunabulum’ which felt like watching the death of the internet through an uncanny & trance-like lens, or the bizarrely erotic fashion film ‘SLUGS ON FIRE’ by Anna Kushnerova & Rodrido Mella, mixing latex costume with overlayed nature footage of slugs in flagrante! We ended with Louis Scantlebury’s ‘Seek Beyond’, a sock puppet existential odyssey, as we follow our handheld hero on his journey to find spiritual enlightenment after being triggered by an advertisement in Piccadilly Circus. This was the perfect closer for a wonderfully experimental & thought-provoking night of film.
So, with all of these themes present in the selection of films, and with multiple possibilities of how to arrange them- what became our final running order? Well, I’ve endeavoured to tie up the different threads of our collective curation below, to let you into the thought processes of our decision making:
INSTALLATION FILMS
We ended up selecting two installation films for this edition of MicroActs, and when deciding the placement, there were a few different considerations. Firstly, flexibility for the audience in the space & in relation to the work, and secondly attendee’s arrival time, needing to leave enough time for the audience to experience both pieces. With these in mind, we decided to have Jeremy Drummond’s ‘Monument’ before & after the short film programme (so if anyone arrived late, they’d have a chance to see it later on), and Mayar Mahfoud’s ‘I miss you, i don’t want to forget you توحشتك, مانبيش ننساك’ in the intermission (when everyone would be in the venue). This is a new part of our programming, and still in its early stages, but I am enjoying offering another approach to watching moving image at our screenings. I am curious about how a less formal mode of viewing the films might affect an audiences’ experience, and how that fluidity might interact with a piece of work. In this edition, I particularly enjoyed that Mayar had a physical artwork accompaniment to her film in the form of embroidered photography printed on fabric; hopefully this is something we can experiment with more in the future with other artist filmmakers.
PART ONE
We wanted to open the short film programme of the screening with immediacy & zeal, so Fanxi Sun’s ‘I kept following until I realized what was true’ felt like the perfect opening film, which ends its journey in a garden. In-keeping with the outdoor environment that closed the first film, we followed on with Lewis Heriz’s ‘On Hannah Fields’ next, a heartfelt portrait of a community garden. The concept of the organic, took us to Katina Bitsicas & Scott McMahon’s ‘Cellulose Documents: Forget Me Not’, and its use of layering botanical close ups & portraiture. This look into the past got us thinking about memory and Cyan Cheng, Chen Zhan & Mengfan Wang’s ‘The Hall’ felt in keeping with the spectral tone, but transitioning us into a more architectural space. Following on with this concept of historic traces in public spheres, we selected Katia Hiver’s 'Memories I Keep Unearthing’, featuring observational shots of contemporary buildings with archival footage. Keeping in an architectural vein, would be our first dance film of the night ‘Niebościan. Freedom lives in a head.’ by Jagoda Turlik, ending with a panning shot up to the sky. To juxtapose the indoor setting & aerial view, we headed outside & into the ground with Christine Banna’s ‘Retreat Into the Swamp’ next. Looking at all the algae & decay of the swamp, we decided to see what the creatures get up to there, and selected ‘SLUGS ON FIRE’ by Anna Kushnerova & Rodrido Mella next on our programme. This was one of the most fun curation choices of the evening and we enjoyed the storyline we’d introduced between the two films in this framework, even with their contrasting tones & completely different original contexts. To end the first half, we moved into a more subtle eroticism with Francesco Coppola’s ‘Enter Asunder’, keeping the connection to the organic with form this time rather than subject. The films hypnotic nature offered the perfect cool down before we started the intermission.
PART TWO
To start the second half off with energy & entice the audience’s interest for part two, we opened with Yasmine Djedje-Fisher-Azoume’s ‘Dédé (Ancestor)’, a rhythmic & sculptural visual feast, celebrating Bété depictions of the female form. In keeping with the body as subject, we decided to follow this film with Arielle Estrada’s ‘Pellicŭla’, moving into an abstracted context whilst remaining textual. Following along the lines of corporeal close ups, we selected Cally Trench’s ‘A Year of Hands’ next, a 1 minute burst of energy to play with the pace & rhythm of the screening. The use of rhythms, made from tapping & vocalisations in Cally’s film, connected to the opening drumming & hand gestures of our second dance film of the programme ‘REESHEH’ by Mahshid Alavi. This film would transition the screening into the themes of cultural identity & diasporic experiences that followed in the next selection of films, and next we had Brandon Christopher Saunders’s ‘Blouse and Skirt’. The use of musical improvisation & visual rhythm in this film worked conscientiously to allow the audience space to sit with the themes explored in the work, both the joys of Black liberation and the horrors of racist violence. We selected Soyeon Jung’s ‘Incubating Home’ to follow, a film also exploring generational trauma, that had an interesting conversation with the two films before it; all in different contexts & mediums, but all offering a space to share these experiences & emotions in solidarity with each other. This was a point in the programming where we knew their needed to be space to breathe after three emotionally charged films in a row, moving into a more relaxed mood to keep the screening’s equilibrium. Soyeon’s film layered images of domestic architecture & agriculture, so we selected Britany Gunderson’s ‘Night Collections #1’ to follow; a peripatetic film explored through materiality, with both works touching on the idea of home & distance. This made Eva Sbaraini’s ‘In Reverie with Trev Flash’ an ideal film to follow Britany’s, and introduced the visual language of 3D rendering and the digital realm. We selected Alex Pearl’s ‘Incunabulum’ next in the programme, moving into a more bizarre vision of the digital space, asking the audience to contemplate the life cycle of an image. This was a perfect fit for the final film in our selection, Louis Scantlebury’s ‘Seek Beyond’, to leave the audience delightfully entertained & existentially contemplative.
I hope this article has offered a more in-depth insight into the MicroActs curation process and further details about the collection of films we were privileged to share at our May screening. As you have just read, there’s always a plethora of options for the direction a screening could go, and themes that weave their way across the programme, to hopefully both challenge & delight the audience in equal measures. I also hope that our approach to curation offers something compelling for the filmmakers who show with us; to perhaps see their work have an engaging conversation with another short film to which it had an unexpected connection. I feel that films, particularly short works, are communal creatures; they long to connect with others. And I hope MicroActs creates a welcoming space for them to meet.
Article by Liberty Antonia Sadler, June 2025
A big thank you to Arianna & the FOMO team for hosting us, and thank you again to all the wonderful Artist/Filmmakers who were part of this edition! Please visit our Filmmaker Archive to check out the filmmaker’s online presence and find out more about their practice, here: https://www.microactslondon.com/archive
We’re delighted to announce our latest Open Call for our next edition of MicroActs!
We will showcase a selection of exciting & inspiring short Artist Film, 6mins or less, from all over the world at a screening in September at FOMO House, a wonderful filmmaker clubhouse situated just off the iconic Brick Lane in east London.
Alongside the in-person screening event, we have launched our livestream platform, allowing our international filmmaker community to join in with the screening and see the films! This takes place live at the film screening, and is available to watch for 4 days following the event, giving every time zone a chance to tune in.
+ We're also looking for installation moving image pieces! These can be up to around 20mins, and selected installation films will be shown in the space, creating an expanded cinema experience and blending the concepts of 'gallery' & 'screening' together. Installation films will also be included in the livestream.
Early bird deadline: Sunday 27th July 2025
Final deadline: Monday 18th August 2025
We look forward to seeing you soon and wish you all a wonderful summer!
Best wishes,
Liberty, Jhenelle & Akinna
The MicroActs Team