Works from Radical Film School – Part II: Holding Fragments

While the films of Part I: The Image Is Not Enough experimented with deconstruction, Part II: Holding Fragments brings together six experimental shorts that remake and rebuild the language of cinema.

Across the works included in this programme, reconstruction emerges as a political and aesthetic method of redefining the representation of our built and natural environments. This reconstructive labour takes many forms: family photographs are recontextualised; historical footage is reordered; oral testimonies are reassembled; the architecture of oppression is challenged. Interweaving personal and political subjects, images and sounds are repurposed by the artists to reveal the conditions in which histories are recorded and remembered, while enacting alternative future applications.

Moving beyond reconstruction as a simple act of restoration, these films engage in complex and ongoing processes of (re)negotiation. Repetition and editing are deployed creatively to produce other spaces where personal and collective histories are left ambiguous and open-ended. 

Alongside acts of imaginative reconstruction, several of these works turn to the natural world, exploring urban and rural landscapes, flora and fauna as repositories of memory, sites or figures of continuity and renewal. Spanning digital and analogue, found footage and animation, this programme offers a journey through recovered materials to position cinema not as a tool for understanding the past but rather as a device for reshaping our relationship to it.

O Bahçeli Ev / That Garden House (2025) is an autobiographical film exploring remembering and forgetting through fragmented memories shaped by narratives, gestures, and objects. Centring on mother and daughter, it traces a ritual of repeated questioning, where shifting recollections reveal multiple versions of the past and remembering becomes a collective way of holding onto the present.

Inspired by mysterious notes that have appeared sporadically around Brixton for over a decade, signed by an unknown female writer, Hurricane Recorder is an experimental piece that uses archive material, performance, and text to give form to the anonymous woman’s voice.

Murmuration is a short poetic film composed of 16mm footage and drawings. The work is a modern-day ghost story, set in a block of flats at night. The film uses visual layering to play with the spectral qualities of memory and explores how birds symbolise a conduit between different worlds and times.

May I Be Sacrificed for You (قربونت برم) unfolds between a top-floor apartment in Isfahan and the uncertain terrain beyond it. Filmed over a two-month stay in Iran, the work observes the filmmaker’s grandmother, whose mobility is shaped by age and architecture. Daily rituals of beauty and routine become quiet assertions of agency within enclosure. As conflict interrupts filming, stillness and movement begin to overlap, holding home and departure, care and rupture, within the same cinematic space.

To a jazzy, vaudevillian soundtrack, artist Mars K collages video elements to depict the alienation they inherited in a Black family at the edge of England. In a reversal of the sci-fi genre’s ethnographic gaze, they look inward at the ways that being othered creates a sense of intra-community fear and division, tracing the divergent forms with which people respond to racism over time. Alien Feeling journeys from a ‘coloured boy’ on a 1970s TV show to the unknown future through the figure of the child, who discovers their own powers while observing the evil above.

Parakeets is a humorous, sensory ethnography of contemporary London told through the city’s most divisive residents, rose-ringed parakeets. Crossing the river and London’s north-south divide, the birds become mischievous observers of gentrification, social tropes, and everyday coexistence in the city. This short is part one of a work in progress.