This year we are delighted to host the 2023 FOCAL Awards at the De Vere Grand Connaught Rooms on June 15th, we hope you can join us. Congratulations to all the shortlisted nominees.
A lone astronaut aboard the ISS suddenly loses communication with Earth. He soon begins to experience a series of strange events that put him and the entire station at risk…
The Looking Glass Anthology is a collection of beautiful, thought-provoking, audio-visual works by a range of musicians and poets that capture what the archives mean to them on a personal level.
The four works in the collection include pieces from Matt McGinn, Rachael Boyd, Stephen Sexton and Eoin O'Callaghan. Each film is different in its own way, yet also complimentary of the whole.
The project challenges us to put ourselves in the shoes of those from the past and imagine what the future may be like, as well as to look within ourselves for answers, in this way being both retrospective and introspective. The pieces are thought provoking, uplifting, bittersweet, challenging, sentimental, heart breaking and inspiring.
“We have cut down. We have!”
“I'll make do without during the week, in order to be able to get three square meals at the weekends when the bairns are home.”
“When you look at the conditions…they're not fit for animals, never mind human beings.”
These are the words of those on the front line of a cost-of-living crisis, but this isn’t 2023, these are the voices of everyday people facing the tough choices fifty years ago, and now revealed as part of a timely short film that reflects on the pandemic cycles of boom and bust that continue to affect us.
The film expresses the fury and anger of generations whose essential needs for safe housing, secure work and full bellies go unfulfilled. With an uncanny sense of déjà vu, these found voices and images from the Yorkshire and North East Film Archives, evoke a past that feels uncomfortably contemporary.
Commissioned by York St John University’s Cinema and Social Justice Project the film exposes our collective memories of past crises, and the cries for social and economic justice that continue to ring so loudly in our ears today.
Getty Images is one of the largest commercial image banks in the world. Many defining images of the last century – images that form a part of our collective memory – only exist behind Getty’s paywall. This film forms a meticulously crafted journey through some of the most significant moments of historical change caught on camera, and an impassioned commentary on how commercial image banks influence what we see. Through an intervention revealed at the end of the narrative, the film also forms a small but direct act of resistance to Getty’s privatization of the past.
