Event

Documentary Poetry Work by Stephen Connolly

An evening of films exploring the fertile territory between documentary and poetic modes of moving image. From diary to essay-film to observational work, London-based artist Stephen Connolly employs a variety of investigative and reconstructive approaches to his non-fiction filmmaking. Serious, yet never solemn, and infused with wit and passion, the work combines an urgency and complexity in the short film form. Connolly combines and layers seemingly disparate images, sounds, and narrative threads to explore the relationships between individual and social agency.

Connolly's film The Whale (2003) is described by the artist as "an oblique meditation on safety, fear and notions of faraway places". The dispassionate camera of Great American Desert (2007) explores an Arizona landscape to the chatter of a flock of Snowbirds. Más Se Perdió (2008) wanders through a revolutionary ruin in Havana, while respectfully appreciating the nuances of image making in this politically contested space. The first section of the program includes the ".. angular, beautifully shot Film for Tom (2005), which broods upon the life and death of a bright, troubled outsider, . breathtakingly measured and sure-footed." 'New Contemporaries', Martin Herbert, Time Out London 2006.