Join Stone Club on a filmic dance through the landscape and ancient sites of Britain. From beating the bounds and folkloric dances to bouncy Stonehenge, Stone Club have curated a selection of short films that fuse the ancient past with the near future in an attempt to better understand how and where we are going. This is the past, present and future contained within one programme.
This screening is dog-friendly – bring your well behaved four legged friend to watch these films about the land they love to run around on
Programme:
Beating the Bounds, 1983 (East Anglian Film Archive at the University of East Anglia, ITV, 5 mins)
Each Spring, David Ainsworth Rector of Sidestrand walks the boundaries of his parish during rogation week to Beat the Bounds; a custom to encourage fruitfulness of the fields. However, keeping the tradition is no easy feat, as navigating by an ancient map, the current landscape has changed. To trace the exact course of the boundary, the Rector has to hitch up his cassock to climb through a parishioner’s window, tackle steep cliff drops and thumb a ride on a passing crab boat!
Tresor, Gwenno, 2022 (25 mins)
Tresor (Treasure) is Gwenno Saunders’ third full length solo album and the second almost entirely in Cornish (Kernewek). This specially commissioned film to accompany it is full of evocative folklore and landscape from Cornwall
Forest Coal Pit, Siôn Marshall-Waters, 2022, 15 mins
Forest Coal Pit is an intimate super 8mm portrait of two elderly brothers who live together on a small farm in the Black Mountains, South Wales.This poetic film reveals their relationship and the hyperlocal world in which they exist – feeding their livestock, tending to their garden and scrap cars, the brothers discuss elephants in China, lobster fishermen, ghosts and each other.
Nefoedd yr Adar – Melin Melyn, George & Edith Morris, 2022 (4 mins)
The music video for a song inspired by an old legend about Nefydd Hardd, a jealous king who drowned a young prince in a lake in Snowdonia in the 12th century. The prince’s name was Idwal, and the lake was named Llyn Idwal in his memory. It is believed that no bird flies over the lake as they are all mourning, and howling is heard in the distance when there is a storm in the valley.
I’ve Been Trying to Tell You, Saint Etienne & Alasdair McLellan, 2021 (45 mins)
I’ve Been Trying To Tell You is the companion film to St Etienne’s album of the same name, directed by the acclaimed British photographer Alasdair McLellan. The film is an evocative look back on the optimism of the 1997-2001 era, a period that was topped and tailed by Labour’s election victory and the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. The film asks was the optimism of that era a lost golden age, or was it a period of naïvety, delusion and folly?
English Magic, Jeremy Deller, 2013 (14 mins)
The video English Magic formed a major part of Jeremy Deller’s exhibition for the British Pavilion in 2013. The film brings together many of the ideas behind the works in the Pavilion, featuring visual and thematic elements that reflect Deller’s interest in the diverse nature of British society and its broad cultural, socio-political and economic history. Featuring music performed by the Melodians Steel Orchestra from South London and was recorded in Studio 2 of Abbey Road Studios in London.
