Selected 16
A screening of bold new artists’ moving image works from across the UK

Beneath the Shell of Sound is a 16mm film that drifts through fragments of memory, landscape and sound. At its heart, the Cicada: its brief, defiant song becoming a symbol of mortality and remembrance. As the film moves between observation and reflection, we dwell in the gaps and uncertainties of remembering. Chanthila reflects on what remains after things are gone and how light and sound can haunt and hold traces of what escapes memory. It considers memory not as a fixed record but as something fragile and continually transforming.

Chanthila Phaophanit is a London-based artist and filmmaker, working across moving image, sound and installation. Often drawn to forms of haunting and return, her work acts as a way to archive and preserve narratives that risk fading from collective consciousness. Through landscape, oral histories and acts of remembrance, her work reflects on the traces people leave behind, how stories persist and transform over time, and the ways places come to hold memory.

I AM THE WORLD is a speculative video that explores how an archive of networked moving images, featuring famed ballroom hosts Selvin “MC Debra” Mizrahi and Kelly Gorgeous Gucci, enables worldly ways of seeing.

I AM THE WORLD is part of a project entitled Scenes of Category Destruction, which emerged from a single-take viral video filmed in 2014 for the ongoing YouTube archive Ballroom Throwbacks TV. The work, the first in a planned series of video-led presentations, narrates a search for ways of seeing in between the end of this humanist world and the next one, in which, as the emcee said already, they are the world. Their images guide our crossing to an alternative present; one made of and for transformed genres of existence, in which the narrator finds his seeing – and possibly, his being – anew.

Che Applewhaite is an artist, filmmaker, editor and writer. He facilitates engagement with how ongoing histories interfere with intimate, difficult and collective experiences. He works primarily with video, photography and written text in hybrid documentary forms. These works embed listening as both practice and ethic of invention, embracing the pain of change and honesty that his many gendered mothers taught us about love. He was born in Trinidad & Tobago.

mmm traces an eclectic constellation of clouds across Japanese cinema from the 1920s to the present. Taking inspiration from the 35mm film materials of physicist and cloud expert Masanao Abe (1891–1966) and from scientist Tapio Schneider's speculation that climate change could one day produce a cloudless sky, the film treats formlessness as an essential actor in the history of cinema.

Chiemi Shimada is a London-based artist and filmmaker. Working across film, performance, installation and workshop, she explores and interrogates memory, liminal states, modernity and late-stage capitalism. Her work has been presented in galleries, museums and film festivals internationally, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Open City Documentary Festival, Courtisane Festival, Arkipel, and at the ICA London, Barbican, the National Archives of Singapore, Cineteca Nacional México and Kunstnernes Hus.

Making the most of the break from daily life, Tommy wanders the hills above his scheme during lockdown, allowing his mind to wander like untethered goats looking for the juiciest grazing...

Based on a short piece written for the Workers' Stories Project by Dumbarton-based housing activist and writer Tommy Lusk (who also appears in the film), Bellsmyre Caledonia touches on issues of housing, work and leisure, and considers the way in which the time opened up by lockdown presented an opportunity for expanded critical thought.

Jack Guariento is a filmmaker and programmer from Scotland, currently based between Glasgow and Montreal. He serves on the programming teams of Glasgow Short Film Festival, Cinema Politica and Tënk.ca, and also curates ad hoc screenings for Cinéma Public in Montreal. His films have been screened at festivals including GSFF, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, and OffBeat Folk Film Club. He is especially interested in the different forms activist and pedagogical film can take, and is most excited by works which break the boundaries of the screen and implicate themselves in the physical and social worlds of their audiences in one way or another.

Wiped out by Dutch settlers less than a century after their arrival on Mauritius to establish a penal colony, the dodo continues to live on as a disembodied signifier of its genocidal extermination. Dead as a Dodo lays bare the settler-colonial mythology at the heart of the popular narrative of the dodo's extinction. By drawing on archival material and the dodo's apparition, the film performs a sensory haunting, reviving the spaces between life and death that have been shaped by settler violence into a value-forming exercise.

This work is inspired by and is in conversation with A Theory of Birds by the Palestinian-American poet Zaina Alsous. Lines from this collection and a zoological study of the dodo (1848) have been collaged into a cento to narrate the fictions of race, name and value that enshrine settler-colonial imaginaria over and above living in "co-dignity" with the land.

Leena Habiballa is a Sudanese artist and cultural worker based in London whose practice spans moving image and experimental analogue processes. She investigates legacies of colonialism, Sudanese visual and material cultures, and archival film practices that subvert state and colonial ideologies. Through counter-archival readings, her work reimagines histories beyond a colonial imagination, forging new connections between past and present.

Habiballa is Co-Director of not/nowhere, an artist workers' cooperative specialising in analogue practices. Her moving image works have been screened at The Showroom, Courtisane Festival, MENA Film Festival, Baltic Analog Lab, Grand Union Gallery, Scribe Video Centre and Rio Cinema. She is the recipient of the Michael O'Pray Prize (2023) for new writing on innovation and experimentation in the moving image.

A Story, An Invocation, An Opening (2025) was devised from somatic intuitive dance workshops with a group of global majority folks, and brings together family archive footage of Trinidad Carnival and sonic rhythms from the region to ignite a ghostly presence representative of personal and collective anxieties and transgenerational trauma. It conjures a sensorial ritual of sound and movement; through the stories our bodies hold and the spectres they manifest.

Working with film and moving image, Rhiana Bonterre's interest begins in the body and all it stores – transgenerational or otherwise – and the rituals, practices and happenings that jolt one into a reckoning with it. Rhiana draws on their Trinidadian upbringing and positioning as a Black mixed-heritage person in the diaspora, seeking to create openings for nuanced, spatial, liberatory possibilities in response to rigid, oppressive, colonial responses within and outside of us.

Utilising montage strategies, Rhiana Bonterre rhythmically weaves together dance, documentary elements, archive and analogue material and sound. For Rhiana, film is embodied experience, creating participatory screenings that invite the witness and collaboration of human and other-than-human presences.

A short documentary about purpose, belonging and creative expression. The film accompanies Kelvin Chan, a British-born Chinese lion dancer, as he moves through the arenas of his life as a committed student of lion dance and martial arts: the sports hall, the home, Chinatown, the ancestral village and the Tin Hau Festival in Hong Kong.

For Kelvin, lion dance is a way of life and a means by which he can feel connected to his community, family and heritage. Journeying between life in London and Hong Kong, the film follows Kelvin's thinking around ideas of home and homeland and explores how the routines and rituals of a creative and/or spiritual practice can provide their own kind of anchoring.

Rosanna is an artist and filmmaker from Essex. Her practice involves sculpture, film, writing and performance, often taking the form of site-responsive installations that explore how objects come to belong to a particular place or moment. Rosanna studied Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art and English Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her work is informed by an interest in phenomenology, theatricality and the choreography of everyday life.

Rosanna approaches filmmaking from a sculptural perspective, where the process of making functions as a mode for exploring space – and our movements within it – drawing attention to the ways we organise the visual and material language of the world around us.

In Silence Seeds Weep is a short film, shot on Super 8 and developed using fermented apples.

The film captures the quiet, cyclical rhythm of nature. It traces the transformation of seeds into apples and apples into trees, following a solitary figure whose silent ritual of sowing reflects loss, renewal and the passage of time. In this act of mourning, the film contemplates unseen forces that sustain life.

The idea for this film came from trying to understand the life cycle in nature, linking birth and rebirth together with burial and decay.

Viviana Almas is a Lithuanian filmmaker and photographer based in London. Born in Baltimore, USA, and raised in Lithuania, her work moves between film, photography and installation, where these forms often overlap rather than remain separate.

Her practice uses real locations and lived narratives, where memory, landscape and cultural identity emerge through encounters with place. Non-professional performers, fragments of stories, and analogue processes including 16mm and 8mm film and photo-etching become ways of staying close to what is present, or what is disappearing.

Her work drifts through the Anthropocene, through places around the world undergoing rapid transformation – either already reshaped or on the edge of industrial change. Landscapes appear as both physical and remembered spaces, carrying traces of ecological and cultural pressure, where perception and memory blur into one another.

She holds a BA in Photography from Falmouth University in the United Kingdom. Her work has been exhibited at South London Gallery (London), J. B. Blunk Estate (San Francisco), Middlesbrough Museum, and the Culture and Communication Centre in Klaipėda. She was nominated for UK New Contemporaries (2026).

Solus drifts through a landscape where imagination and reality blur. Filmed on Super 8 and developed with a solution made from fermented acorns gathered on site, the work holds a trace of the place itself.

The idea came from thinking about how an artist's life and practice are often inseparable. As the painter moves through the terrain, his paintings begin to take on life and he becomes one of the characters from his own work.

The boundaries collapse between image and world, artist and creation, until everything begins to merge into a single, fluid experience of making and being.

Viviana Almas is a Lithuanian filmmaker and photographer based in London. Born in Baltimore, USA, and raised in Lithuania, her work moves between film, photography and installation, where these forms often overlap rather than remain separate.

Her practice uses real locations and lived narratives, where memory, landscape and cultural identity emerge through encounters with place. Non-professional performers, fragments of stories, and analogue processes including 16mm and 8mm film and photo-etching become ways of staying close to what is present, or what is disappearing.

Her work drifts through the Anthropocene, through places around the world undergoing rapid transformation – either already reshaped or on the edge of industrial change. Landscapes appear as both physical and remembered spaces, carrying traces of ecological and cultural pressure, where perception and memory blur into one another.

She holds a BA in Photography from Falmouth University in the United Kingdom. Her work has been exhibited at South London Gallery (London), J. B. Blunk Estate (San Francisco), Middlesbrough Museum, and the Culture and Communication Centre in Klaipėda. She was nominated for UK New Contemporaries (2026).