Beast Type Song

In Beast Type Song (2019), Sophia Al-Maria stages a richly textured meditation on erasure, power, and embodied memory. Shot in the derelict former campus of Central Saint Martins, over the course of the film’s fragmentary narrative we encounter the voices of three AWOL veterans of a solar war played by Yumna Marwan, Elizabeth Peace, and Tosh Basco, as well as Al-Maria herself playing the character of Slug – a time-travelling narrator who appears throughout a suite of films by Al-Maria. Beast Type Song blends personal histories with public legacies of colonialism, reflecting on narratives and languages we have inherited. Through choreographed movement, monologues, literary and audiovisual citations, and shifts in narrative tone that are punctuated by typography (the asterisk which has become a recurring glyph throughout Al-Maria's work) the film resists dominant histories and compels reflection by asking: what is our complicity, how do we rewrite what’s been omitted, and what stories do we carry forward when the official versions collapse?