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. We’re now proud to bring their imaginative work to a wider audience, as over the course of the next eight weeks, we present a selection of these shorts in preview to a feature presentation in our regular programming.
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.
Cowsmos
2 mins
Directed by Yolanda Zhou
Preceding DJ Ahmet on Tuesday 28th April – Book tickets
Our season blasts off with the irreverent Cowsmos, boldly going where no cow has gone before. Inspired by the motif of cow UFO abductions in conspiracy and pop culture, the surreal satellite of Yolanda Zhou’s short playfully untethers us from earth, and into the milky way – but not as we know it. Meanwhile, ground control to Macedonia, in a remote Yörük village, techno herds the hearts of a new generation yearning to break free from the yoke of tradition. A Sundance barnstormer, DJ Ahmet is a charming footloose revolt exploring the tender clash between duty and unfettered expression, and boasting a dayglo sheep, in this offbleat slice of bucolic whimsy.
Untitled
4 mins
Directed by Isabella Lucas
Preceding The Drama on Tuesday 28th April – Book tickets
In Isabella Lucas’ Untitled, the forging of an uncanny bouquet provides the place setting for The Drama, starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson as a couple whose looming nuptials are thrown into turmoil, when a shocking secret threatens to rupture their fragile veneer of bourgeois material perfection. Silently skewering the destructive sterility of quiet luxury, Lucas plants an acrid seed that also festers within the black comedy of The Drama’s toxic marriage plot, by asking: “why do we exist only through the values of the things that will destroy us?”
A Perfect Shade of Pink
7 mins
Directed by Yao Mou
Composed by Richard Meehan
Preceding Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 on Tuesday 5th May – Book tickets
Described by director Yao Mou as a “pig’s soliloquy”, A Perfect Shade of Pink takes us on a nose to tail odyssey through the jaws of consumption and exploitation. With composer Richard Meehan, Mou masticates sound and image into a carnivorous kaleidoscope of markets and abattoirs, organic and synthetic, keenly vivisecting how when it comes to both flesh and media, we are what we eat. This grotesque amuse-bouche trots with four legs good into Orwell: 2+2=5, Raoul Peck’s anticipated follow up to the award winning I am Not Your Negro. Following the career and legacy of George Orwell, Peck’s documentary examines how authoritarian tactics have come to insidiously distort our media, regimes, and minds as we are mired in a post truth world on the brink of dystopia.
In the Lightest Form of Being
7 mins
Directed by Siyu Chen
Preceding The Blue Trail on Tuesday 12th May – Book tickets
An enigmatic menagerie of taxidermy animals, aliens shimmering in lustrous spandex, a figure in fur destined to dance earthbound. Siyu Chen’s In the Lightest Form of Being is an anthropological dreamscape made iridescent, a surreal ballad of day and night, decay and fertility, sky and earth, cloaked in gold and mercury. The strange aura of Chen’s molten reverie pours readily into the psychedelic vessel of The Blue Trail. In a near future Brazil where the elderly are put out to pasture, 77 year old Teresa defies fate by taking a fantastical voyage down the Amazon, finding new life in the vivid rhythms of the river and jungle.
Letters to Living Islands
5 mins
Director: Naiya Ellis-Woodward
Preceding The North on Tuesday 19th May – Book tickets
Naiya Ellis Woodward’s Letters to Living Islands transports us to the Outer Hebrides, in a dissonantly eerie tone poem that eddies between myth and psychogeography. Transitions textured like digital lichen blend satellite imagery and stark natural beauty, while Scott Wearing’s atonal compositions harness the spectral energy surging in the ancient coastline tapestries of water, earth, and stone. Our weird walk then heads for The North, which captures the stunning landscapes of the Scottish Highlands, in Bart Schrijiver’s tale of old friendship rekindled in a wanderlust trek of the West Highland Way and Cape Wraith Trail.
Thank you 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.
