The Ultimate Picture Palace are delighted to partner with Ruskin School of Art, to exhibit a selection of their students’ short films. Last February, students were given the opportunity to showcase their films at The Ultimate Picture Palace during a two-hour screening. After a successful introduction, showing 8 films over the past 8 weeks, we’re excited to extend the program and bring more of the students’ imaginative work to a wider audience.
Curated to whet the appetite before each screening, Ruskin’s joyfully eclectic portfolio comprises shorts produced within the last academic year, borne out of the filmmakers’ creative zeal, and a free exploration of a wide range of mediums and artistic disciplines. This dialogue between upcoming and established filmmakers celebrates the visionary young talent honing their craft from within our local community, and offers a window into the next generation of artists and filmmakers making their mark on screen.
As our second round of shorts kicked off this past week, read ahead for a recap and preview of what will be gracing our screen this coming month
Pylons
1 min
Directed by Jack Wooley
Preceded Wild Foxes on Tuesday 26th May
The first punches are thrown by the pugilistic Pylons of Jack Wooley’s short, staging a skirmish between two objects bristling with the detritus of our Anthropocene. Wooley draws on his background in architecture and expanded painting to create a standoff imitating stop motion body and soul, jostling up against the mechanical infractions of time, space and material. Going the distance into Wild Foxes, our next bout is with a young boxer who finds himself psychologically on the ropes, clashing with friends, teammates and his coach after an accident threatens to snuff his athletic prowess. Valéry Carnoy’s Cannes prize-fighter grazes the livid bruises of masculinity, adolescence, and working class ambition in a tender portrayal of a scavenger in crisis.
320 Nishtar Block
3 mins
Directed by Fatima Butt
Preceding Ultras on Tuesday 2nd June – Book tickets
Crossing the municipal threshold of 320 Nishtar Block in Pakistan, a fractured horizon of eight surveillance channels chronicle different vantage points of the same charged incident. Disarticulating banal notions of objective truth, director Fatima Butt choreographs a centrifuge of the collective, breaking the rigid and linear dogmas girding colonial history and memory. A fugue of domestic bells and whistles crescendo into the euphoric roar of a stadium crowd in Ultras, a riotous paean to football’s most ardent subculture. A haptic bottle-rocket of sound and image, Ragnhild Ekner’s documentary charts the colourful community and rituals of these fanatics, immersing you in the cacophony of their follies and fervours, triumphs and catastrophes.
The Painter
8 mins
Directed by Phoebe Birch, Naia Searight
Preceding The Christophers on Tuesday 9th June – Book tickets
Silver screen becomes a reflexive canvas under the brushstrokes of The Painter, an impressionistic mood piece in which artist and muse, figure and landscape, day and night bleed like watercolours. Agitated by gusts of breath, cascading water, the coarse whisper of paint brushes, our model is captured in portrait before becoming a nocturnal fugitive enveloped in a hazy marshland. From painter to feinter, we forge into eclectic auteur Steven Soderbergh’s wry and spry black comedy The Christophers. This sharp two hander stars Ian McKellen as an acerbic, ailing artist for whom the well has run dry, and Michaela Coel as an inscrutable conservator, posing as his assistant in order to copy and finish a series of incomplete paintings that could fetch his children a fortune after his death. Featuring career best roles for McKellen and Coel, Soderbergh’s latest is a sly diptych singing with duplicitous wit, scrutinising ego, legacy and ownership from within the cloistered milieu of fine art.
Ebbtide on the Hidden
7 mins
Directed by Se Lyn Lim
Composed by Moon Han
Preceding Fairyland on Tuesday 16th June – Book tickets
Inspired by Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, girlhood is a mysterious grotto in director Se Lyn Lim’s Ebbtide on the Hidden. Lured by the diaphanous saxophone of Moon Han’s score, we float through a cabinet of curiosities littered with the amulets and flotsam of dream, clouded by the sediments and jellyfish gossamer of memory. We resurface on the shores of San Francisco, where a grieving father and latchkey child both come of age as they seek a new harbour of self discovery and security. Produced by Sofia Coppola, and adapted from Alysia Abbott’s memoir of the same name, Fairyland is a pensive snapshot of the Bay Area’s countercultural haven in the 1970s, the quest for queer utopia in the face of the looming AIDS crisis, and the noble failures of parenting.
Thank you once again to Madeleine Shepherd and Naia Searight for bringing this project to the UPP, and collaborating with us to give your Tuesday evenings a little artistic flare.
Programmed by Kit Finnie and Georgia Humphreys.
