Lauren Heckler and Shanzay Subzwari’s 2025 film ‘Sister Sing a Song’. Pic Lauren Heckler and Shanzay Subzwari.
Lovers of the visual arts are advised not to miss this Saturday’s screening of innovative short-films at Tower Hamlets’ Nunnery Gallery.
‘Visions in place’ is the latest event in the gallery’s well-established “Visions in the Nunnery” exhibition, which is held just once every two years.
Taking place between 12pm – 4pm, Saturday’s screening will feature works from award-winning filmmakers from all over the world in an “intimate screening” of “boundary-pushing films.”
Among this year’s shorts is Karen Russo’s 2024 film Sinkholes, which pictures a dystopian vision of a world in which water has become scarce. Shot in the arid environments of Israel and Palestine, Russo’s film takes as its starting point the drying of the Red Sea in a visually-striking exploration of ecological collapse.
‘Sinkholes’ (2024). Pic: Karen Russo
The highlight of the afternoon could well be Dorothy Cheung’s 2025 short ‘as a bird that briefly perches’. The London-based filmmaker draws on her upbringing in Hong Kong through the analogy between human nature and greenhouse gardening.
The 16 minute film reflects “the implications of rooting, re-rooting and growing” in the “evolving dynamics between land and human” and is one of the afternoon’s more under-the-radar films, giving viewers a chance to see one of the rising stars in London’s film scene.
Cheung told ELL: “It is a 3-part essay film that reflects on personal queer diasporic experience with granite and botanical gardens. It concludes with a documentation on a young farmer from Hong Kong who grows Asian vegetables in suburban London. As she saves seeds after every crop, these seeds become more resilient to displacement and farther from their origins.”
She added: “My practice is generally about the intersection of identities and the many forms memories (and forgetting) can take. I am particularly interested in hybrid forms of documentary and experimental moving image.”
Tessa Garland, one of the exhibitions curators, told ELL: “[Cheung’s film] hasn’t yet had significant attention in the UK, although I’m sure her work will continue to attract increasing critical acclaim.”
Umi Ishihara’s ‘Thundergod’ (2024) is another fascinating entry. Exploring themes of mythology, religion and resilience, Ishihara’s film tells the story of an underground club that only those who have survived lightning strikes are invited to perform in.
The afternoon will also show some more experimental work including Simon Rattigan’s ‘RiverView’ (2024), which invites viewers to reflect on the brutalist architecture of south London’s Thamesmead estate through a split-screen camera, evoking ideas of “synchronicity and psychogeography”.
‘Thundergod’ (2024). Pic: Umi Ishihara.
Lauren Heckler and Shanzay Subzwari’s ‘Sister Sing a Song (there’s a shallow answer and then there’s the deeper answer)’brings together the artist’s Welsh and Pakastani origins. The film depicts a hybrid watch party between the two countries, asking the question: “can histories be absorbed in ways that foster empathy and an understanding of nuance?”
Saturday’s screening is curated by Nigerian-British filmmaker and visual artist Onyeka Igwe, joint-winner of the 2025 Film London Jarman Award. Her work, which focuses on “the prosaic and everyday aspects of black livingness”, has been shown in galleries across the world, including a solo exhibition at Tate Britain which will be running until May next year.
East London-based artist Onyeka Igwe, one of the event’s curators. Pic: Lucy Snell.
Garland told ELL: “This year, the exhibition is curated in dialogue with our lead artist Onyeka Igwe’s film ‘the names have been changed, including my own and truths have been altered’. We’ve built the wider exhibition around themes and ideas present in her work: memory, narrative, identity, and the archive.”
The exhibition costs between £3-£5 and will run from 12:00pm Saturday December 6 at the Nunnery Gallery. Tickets can be booked on the Bow Arts website.
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