The Derek Jarman Lab is actively developing a slate of exciting feature length and short essay films – and we are constantly looking for new subjects and potential collaborations.
Europe Endless
Short Film, 23mins 16sec
Directed by Christopher Roth
Produced by The Derek Jarman Lab
Completed June 2018
Following Britain’s decision to leave the European Union in June 2016, literary critic and film producer Colin MacCabe visited celebrated writer Patrick McCabe in his hometown of Clones, Co. Monaghan, to discuss his novels, the impact of the referendum on the Irish border, and the Republic of Ireland’s relationship with Europe.
Featuring musical performances, the famous DeLorean time machine, and a McCabe clan rally, this fascinating exploration of Irish identity and Ireland’s often troubled history captures Patrick McCabe’s unique and darkly comic perspective at this defining moment in history.
About the Filmmakers:
Colin MacCabe is a literary critic and film producer. For more than thirty years he has taught at the University of Pittsburgh where he is Distinguished Professor of English and Film. He has worked with
a wide range of directors including Terence Davies, Jean-Luc Godard, Derek Jarman, Isaac Julien, Chris Marker, and Christopher Roth. Before setting up the Derek Jarman Lab in 2012, he produced for the British Film Institute and Minerva Pictures. His latest books are Perpetual Carnival: Essays on Film and Literature (Oxford University Press: 2017) and, with Adam Bartos, Studio: Remembering Chris Marker (OR books: 2017).
Christopher Roth is an artist and a film and theatre director. He edited Andi Engel’s Melancholia in 1989. His film Baader won the Alfred Bauer prize in the 2002 Berlinale. Represented by Esther Schipper Gallery, Berlin, he participated in the Venice, Berlin, and Sao Paulo biennials. His 1982 novel 200 D was reprinted in 2012 by Bloomsbury/Berlin publishers. 80*81 and 2081 What Happened? were projects involving more than 40 worldwide theatre performances and generating 13 books. His latest feature film was Hyperstition. Since 2016 Roth has been making Jeanne und Jean. Und Otto, a coming-of-age film on the Otto Muehl Commune. He lives in Berlin Lichtenberg.
Slumming to Another Drum
Feature length documentary
Film by Bartek Dziadosz & Nalini Persram
Produced by The Derek Jarman Lab
Currrently in development
[I you would like to see a teaser, please get in touch]
Dharavi in Mumbai, one of the world’s most densely populated slums, is located beside the runways of Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, one of the world’s busiest international trafic intersections. Over recent decades, the inhabitants of Dharavi have been resisting the airport authority’s plans for commercial redevelopment of the land on which the slum is located. This is a struggle which, against the grain of the dominant narrative of global neoliberalism, has had a number of successes for the inhabitants of this slum settlement.
Slumming to Another Drum is a feature length documentary which aims to examine such disruptions and nuances in the global discourse about the world’s poor. Often such stories are used as illustrations of concepts such as ‘the ingenuity of the poor’. But this film is not interested in contributing to any such facile representations of slum life – we want to look closely at the complicated economic and cultural transactions that happen between the slum and the world outside it.
To this end, the film will primarily be focused on slum dwellers in Dharavi in Mumbai, and in Neza in Mexico City. In Mexico, the production will be working in collaboration with researchers from the Universidad Technológico de Monterrey and a number of professionals in third sector organizations. In India, the production will be drawing on the research and informants of Dr Nalini Persram. In both cases we are building on existing fieldwork in these locations conducted by local informants and researchers. The narrative mode of the film will be observational, slow-paced, and character driven.
In this film we will ask what motivates the audacious attempt by the destitute to scale the steep, smooth walls of poverty? What do the technologies of escape look like? What do the dispossessed possess that the rich do not recognize, and fundamentally lack? How is poverty defined by the rich, and conversely, how is wealth redefined by some in slum societies? And importantly, what do western cultural references to the ingenuity of the poor entail and hope to accomplish? Neoliberalism entails a grossly widening disparity between rich and poor, privatization of public institutions, and individualism writ large in the form of free and autonomous corporations. In response, at the core of this project is a focus on the way the ‘return of the gaze’ by those in poverty can transform the narrative of poverty itself, and shed light on the inherent contradictions of the promise and violence in the neoliberal system.
About the Filmmakers:
Bartek Dziadosz is the Director at the Derek Jarman Lab. He was cinematographer on Spring, A Song for Politics and Harvest in the Lab’s acclaimed The Seasons in Quincy sequence. He also directed A Song for Politics and edited Harvest. His documentary on the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, The Trouble with Being Human These Days, has screened around the world.
Nalini Persram teaches Social and Political Thought at York University, Toronto, where she is researching Dharavi amongst other topics such as subjectivity and survival, Caribbean forms of culture and resistance, and other sites of political theory. She has taught at Trinity College, Dublin and the University of the West Indies, and is the editor of Postcolonialism and Political Theory (Lexington Books, 2008).
Jo Spence: Cultural Sniper
Directed by Bea Moyes
Produced by:
The Derek Jarman Lab
Currently in Development
The feminist, socialist photographer, Jo Spence, was celebrated during her life for her bold photographs that critiqued the normative modes of representation around gender, class, sexuality, and our role in society. Beginning her career as a high-street photographer, Spence became increasingly politically aware in the 1970s, and concerned with the relationship to power and powerlessness as a photographer. She became a vocal opponent of the ‘elitist’ forms of social realist photography, which she felt lent towards the voyeuristic in the observation of social struggles. Instead she looked back to the radical photographers of the 1930s for models of politically engaged photography. It was during the 1970s and 1980s that Spence’s collaborative practice flourished within the burgeoning community arts movement in London. Through the workshop movement she found a political vehicle for photography, and her interest in democratising the technologies of photographic production and the means of self-representation – subjects which have particular relevance today.
Jo Spence: Cultural Sniper is a feature-length essay film examining the cultural and political legacy of Jo Spence’s work. The film will consider the context of her collaborative practice in the 1970s and 1980s, as a photographer, writer, and educator, as well as her involvement in many significant community arts cooperatives in East London: such as The Half Moon Photography Workshop, Camerawork magazine, the Hackney Flashers, Spare Rib, the Polysnappers, as well as her co-founding of the Photography Workshop with Terry Dennett.
Over a quarter of a century since her early death in 1992, the film will reflect on some of the questions Spence posed through her photographs, and their relevance to photographers and activists working today. The film will also look at the legacy of Spence’s photography, and her wishes to continue to be ‘polemical and socially useful’ through her photographic archive. With the increasing interest and popularity of her work over the past decade, the film will consider how archives and collections of Spence’s work can negotiate the complexities of balancing the veneration of her work as an individual artist with Spence’s own radical collaborative practice during her lifetime, and with her politics.
Cultural Sniper will examine a fascinating and long overlooked period in London’s cultural history, during which community arts rewrote the definitions of art, and who it was for. In doing so the film will record voices from Spence’s life who have long been neglected in this history, and seek to consider the photographic legacy of Jo Spence within the context of London at that time.
I don’t want to end up as an ‘Art Gallery Hack’ – my work will be sterilized if it is shown out of context. So “little treasure,” keep it polemical and socially useful.
(Jo Spence, 1992)
Photographic technology is so highly evolved and relatively cheap that we now have a potentially revolutionary means of production in our hands.
(Rosy Martin and Jo Spence, 1985)
The Forest in Me
Directed by Rebecca E. Marshall
Co-produced by The Derek Jarman Lab
Currently in post-production
Three parallel stories: a seventy-one-year-old woman survives in remote seclusion in the vast Siberian forest, a crew of astronauts lives isolated in a hi-tech pod on a Hawaiian volcano, archive footage of a mother’s life from the last twenty years shows strange and familiar moments of everyday events.
The three strands weave together forming a filmic letter to the future from a mother to her son as he turns eighteen in 2033. In a direct personal tone, the letter expresses the mother’s own thoughts about the human experience of time and timelessness in a world that is vastly changing its perception of time through constant advances in technology and communication.
The Forest in Me addresses the universal fascination with the experience of time. Forming the film as a conversation from a parent to a child using everyday language about specific experiences provides an inclusive and clarifying backbone to the lm from the outset. Drawing together three very different stories the intention is to reveal shared human moments.
Our strategy in the film is to allow one strand to inform the other as new information emerges, and so carefully shaping a sense of timeless human desires that can echo between the three stories. Past, present and future can co-exist as everyday moments of life continue, underlined by the archive footage jumping through years of time like memories.
The film offers a glimpse at the communality of humans: moving from film of Agayfa’s nightly fire to the brightly twinkling stars, we consider the somehow heartening and astonishing idea that a group of astronaut avatars, on the first manned journey into the heart of deep space, could be gathering around a virtual fire like the first humans did on Earth 400,000 years ago.
Rebecca E Marshall is an artist filmmaker whose working process includes the use and reuse of her personal film archive; an expanding reservoir of vibrant moments from everyday life. Past work has included a series of moving-image works funded by The Arts Council exploring the everyday experience of time, drawing from the essays of Michel De Montaigne, who tried to create an honest self-portrait including all the strengths, weaknesses, fears and joys of his daily life experiences. This work was presented at a number of venues including The Hastings Jerwood Gallery, The Electric Palace Cinema and Hastings Museum and Art Gallery. She has since been given a full scholarship to continue this project as a practice based PhD by The London Film School and Exeter University.
Her previous short documentaries include Bee Fever, a carefully observed character study of woman with cancer and how she uses her love of bee keeping as a metaphor to understand death and the cycle of life. Glitter and Storm offered an immersive plunge into the experience of swimmers in the English Channel by night and by day; portraits in water of a diverse range of characters from artists to bankers including filmmaker Andrew Kötting. The swimmers discuss time and death, balanced within both calm and stormy seas, drenching the viewer into a horizontally banded joyful world. The Forest in Me develops in long-form the recurring themes of her work.
www.rebeccaemarshall.com