Screening Room 00: Gathering

This inaugural edition of Screening Room was curated by Stephanie Bailey. It gathers three films by Basma al-Sharif, Sophia Al-Maria, and Lawrence Lek, who all attended the Mission Gathering in February 2025. Their films, in different ways, utilise and blend diverse forms and genres, including documentary and speculative fiction, to explore themes of colonial history, conflict, and representational and political crises. The programme will run until the end of January 2026. 

An anonymous group of cartographers set out to fill their time by measuring distance. Innocent measurements become political, drawing attention to how image and sound communicate history, tragedy, and the complication of Palestinian nationalism. We Began By Measuring Distance reveals an ultimate disenchantment with facts, exploring what happens when the visual fails to communicate the tragic.

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 series of Al-Maria's. Beast Type Song blends personal histories with the public legacies of colonialism, reflecting on its inherited narratives and languages. 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 calls into question dominant histories by asking: what is our complicity, how do we rewrite what has been omitted, and what stories do we carry forward when the official versions collapse?

Temple OST is an album-length CGI music video for Lawrence Lek’s video game set in a deserted, post-crisis London. Originally commissioned for an exhibition at 180 The Strand, the work operates simultaneously as film, game, and soundscape: an immersive journey through a simulated city where spectral ravers travel from a ruined Tube station to a ghostly nightclub buried underground.

A companion to Lek’s feature-length musical AIDOL (2019), in which a fading pop diva stages a comeback with help from an AI ghostwriter, Temple OST extends that narrative into a playable club environment rendered cinematic. Drawing from the Japanese term karaoke – ‘empty orchestra’ – the film unfolds as a nonlinear requiem: a rave without ravers, a dancefloor after the fall.

Constructed entirely from in-game footage and scored to an original album composed by Lek, Temple OST blurs the line between narrative cinema and virtual architecture. Its ethereal anthems and synthetic refrains echo through vacant tunnels and neon corridors, mapping the emotional landscape of a world where memory persists only as simulation.

Developed in the aftermath of personal loss, the film’s empty club becomes more than a setting; it is a spatial expression of absence, escapism, and emotional residue. At once elegy and environment, Temple OST reframes the music video as extended cinematic architecture—a full-length portrait of a future haunted by its own past.

Credit: Commissioned for 180 The Strand. Soundtrack available on the Vinyl Factory (VF344).