Category Archives: Poetry Film

A coat in Tarevci

In the misty village of Tarevci, Bosnia, a coat hanging from a line swings eerily in the wind. Bodyless and moving aimlessly, it presents a striking image: an analogy of both the rejection and consequent emptiness experienced by a recent failed love conquest, and the overarching dystopian feeling of a world full of disappointments. This is particularly symbolic with regards to the film’s setting: Bosnia is a country racked by countless broken promises and betrayals by those in power; Tarevci itself a Muslim enclave in the Serbian stronghold of Srpska – a misfit, outsider, begging to be worn and looked after.…

The Debris Field

The Debris Field (subtitle ‘Salvaging the Titanic in Word, Sound and Image’) is a multi-media event devised, written and performed by Simon Barraclough, Isobel Dixon and Chris McCabe. Our words are wonderfully enhanced and supported by original music from Oli Barrett (of the brilliant Petrels and Bleeding Heart Narrative) and new film from Jack Wake-Walker. Debuted at the BFI South Bank on April 14th 2012, 100 years to the night of the tragedy, the show offers a richly overlapping multi-media experience – a showcasing of five talented individuals, both as solo artists and as partners in collaborative alchemy.…

Ten Thousand Things

The flowing river of time is endless and inevitable – so why do people kid themselves into thinking their life stands still? This film presents a journey through a man’s collected moments, touching on many human issues including childhood, tradition, love and voyeurism. A poetic narration crafted from the words of Jorge Luis Borges accompanies. All the footage was shot on a mobile phone then recorded again off a laptop screen – this was to accentuate one of the film’s themes that technology, and in particular digital screens, seem to create barriers to reality. The narration was artificially constructed from a series of lectures by Borges about poetry. Single words and phrases were chopped up to create a new poetic…

A Bosnian Chronicle

A Bosnian Chronicle presents life in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina through a series of journeys across the divided country, revealing the richness and complexity of a place that has brought so much tragedy to our time and known so little peace. As in the work of Ivo Andric and his masterwork, Bosnian Chronicle, the film exposes through archive footage and original filming the immense beauty of the dramatic landscape with its eerie hilltop fortresses, alongside and in contrast to the corrupting and divisive machinations of those in power. In so doing, notions of time, the past, history, are shown to be enfolded within the present it created as any attempts to historicise the war in Bosnia, to consider it the…

Sunspots

Sunspots is a poetic, musical, and visual journey from the birth of the Sun, through its long and eventful life, towards its ultimate death. Is the Sun a god, a man, a woman, or simply a giant ball of hydrogen? Why does it tell fibs about its favourite painters? Is the Sun afraid of dying? Does it get depressed? And what does it really think about us, and the solar system it is bound to care for? Simon Barraclough (Poet in Residence at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory) is your guide on a journey that mixes fact, fiction, horror, humour and joy. This hour-long show fuses words, film and songs that vary in style from the infectiously poppy to the…