St Leonards Meets the World - May 2024
Toby Tatum’s 2019 film The Garden features as part St Leonards Meets the World.
Pictured: Joe Packer: ‘Nashgumbrook III’ 2020 and Robyn Litchfield: ‘In Deep Verdure’ 2024
St Leonards meets The World will open 6-9 pm on Fri 17 May at the Electro Studios in St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, UK, and run to 27 May. Curator Paul Carey-Kent – whose home town is St Leonards – has matched six artists based there with six UK-based artists who bring an international dimension. Pairings are founded on the idea that the works have enough in common that a conversation between them will prove interesting. It is to be celebrated that, despite Brexit and the way Britain is run, there are still plenty of artists from across the world who are based in the UK. Artists:
Geraldine Swayne + Miho Sato (Japan)
Hermione Allsopp + Blue Curry (Bahamas)
Colin Booth + Koushna Navabi (Iran)
Toby Tatum + Tereza Buskova (Czech Republic)
Joe Packer + Robyn Litchfield (New Zealand)
Alice Walter + Kristian Evju (Norway)
Alternate Sensory Reality - March 2024
Toby Tatum’s Mental Space screens at CINAESTHESIA, the second in a series of three screening events presented by Alternate Sensory Reality in collaboration with Imperfect Cinema. The programme notes state that:
”Alternate Sensory Reality has the pleasure to present four films from filmmakers based in the UK, Prague, and Brooklyn, bringing moving image investigations of sensory perception to this intimate screening in Stonehouse, Plymouth.
Explorations of boundaries of inner and outer experience will start within Toby Tatum's Mental Space, followed by William Luz's intensive meditation on thinking as an act of making visible. Tereza Stehlikova's Self-Isolation Dinner will lead into a contemplation of the role of olfactory and tactile sensations on human connection, ending with Charles de Augustin's Interior Shot which viscerally questions the acts of looking, watching, hearing and listening as part of film experience.”
23rd March, 2024, Manor Street Galleries, Stonehouse, Plymouth, UK. More details here and here. This event is free and open to all.
Becoming Landscape - St. Moritz Art Film Festival - August - September 2023
Toby Tatum’s 2019 film Night on the Riverbank will be presented at Becoming Landscape, the 2nd edition of the St. Moritz Art Film Festival. In his review of the film critic Borja Calvo suggested that, when watching Night on the Riverbank, spectators “enter the terrain of the most magical and translucent night”. Calvo’s review, which is online in full here, also praises “the fantastic musical composition of Abigail Fry that manages to transcend attractive contemplation and reach the territory of fantasy and dream.”
Becoming Landscape also features work by Sarah Morris and Robert Cahen, among numerous others. The festival takes place in St. Moritz, Switzerland, from the 31st of August to the 3rd of September. More information is online here.
CineAutopsia - Bogotá Experimental Film Festival - August 2023
“IN EVERY FRAME, A UNIVERSE”
“SOON OTHER DIMENSIONS WILL UNFOLD BEFORE YOUR EYES”
Toby Tatum’s 2022 film The Nursery of Worlds will premiere at the 9th edition of CineAutopsia - Bogotá Experimental Film Festival.
The festival promises potential attendees that “soon other dimensions will unfold before your eyes” and that, amid this year’s selection, viewers will be able to locate “in every frame, a universe”.
The CineAutopsia mission statement reads:
“CineAutopsia - Bogotá Experimental Film Festival is a Colombian platform for formation, creation and exhibition of audiovisual works focused on narrative, technical and conceptual experimentation. The festival welcomes works of art and artists that transcend aesthetic, technical and semiotic limits and break with the dominant and standardized discourse.”
“We believe that experimental cinema is a free, radical and purposeful cinema that responds to the needs of the author, whether from an aesthetic, political or philosophical stance of seeing and exploring cinematographic horizons, far from the big industries and hegemonic formulas of creation. It is through experimental cinema that we find authentic ways to create audiovisual art.”
The film has been selected for the Other Latitudes Panorama, which focusses on work from Europe and North America. Programmers LED (Julián Medina) and Juan Camilo Álvarez, state that:
“Consciousness about the world is not unique or privileged, but in audiovisual art the question lies in what surrounds us and how the space/time factor affects us. In this program different looks interposed, among other topics, for the daily and research becoming, also for the influence of science and technology in human life, as well as by the critical/philosophical discourse and the notion of “body” as plastic matter for audiovisual creation. In this panorama, thoughts, memories and dreams of artists and directors are manifested through intimate images and the symbolic power of objects.”
The festival runs from the 18th to the 25th of August, 2023. More information is online here.
Festival Ecrã - July 2023
Toby Tatum’s 2022 film A Spell in Fairyland will premiere at the 7th Festival ECRÃ. The Rio de Janeiro-based festival will present the film as part of its online programme, allowing anyone with access to an internet connection to tune-in worldwide.
Festival ECRÃ takes places between the 29th of June and the 9th of July (with the online programme streaming between the 6th and the 9th of July). Watch the film here.
Festival Ecrã - July 2022
The Visitation has been programmed to screen at Festival Ecrã in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This screening marks the first international presentation of the work. The in-person event will take place from the 1st to the 10th of July. In addition, the festival will also stream The Visitation online, as part of a complementary online screening programme. This online instalment will take place from the 16th to the 24th of July, with the film accessible worldwide.
More information about the 2022 Festival Ecrã programme is online here.
Landscape Imaginary - May 2022
Toby Tatum’s 2017 film Lost Gardens screens as part of Landscape Imaginary, a project by artist Daniel & Clara.
The screening includes films by artists Ben Rivers, Toby Tatum, Seán Vicary and Daniel & Clara, which aim to conjure on screen atmospheric landscapes both real and imagined.
The screening takes place at 5pm, Sat 21st May at East Mersea Village Hall, Essex, UK. Entry is free.
The presentation will be followed by a Q&A with the artists.
More information about this screening and the Landscape Imaginary project overall can be found here.
Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival - April 2022
Toby Tatum’s film The Visitation has been programmed to premiere at the 2022 Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival. Alchemy is a special site, a temporal zone where the visions of the age make themselves manifest. The festival will take place in Hawick, UK, from 28th April to 2nd May.
The Visitation screens on Friday 29th April, showing as part of the Our Shape Apparently programme.
More information about this screening is online here.
NatureMax - November 2021 - February 2022
Two of Toby Tatum’s films have been included in NatureMax, an exhibition at Giant in Bournemouth, UK. NatureMax meditates on our changing relationship to the natural world, a world overshadowed by the dread spectre of climate change. The essay by curator Paul Carey-Kent, written to accompany the exhibition, states:
“How should we relate to nature? As recently as fifty years ago the anthropocentric way of looking purely through the lens of human outcomes was the mainstream assumption, at least in western traditions. Yet the growing consensus around the effect of a history of exploiting and abusing nature has altered how we see the relationship. Timothy Morton has suggested how ‘putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman’. Rather, we should see humans as just one species among many in the ecosystem, and hold that the natural environment is intrinsically valuable independent of what benefit accrues to people.
Art is good at evoking, amplifying, and provoking in response to such shifts in perception. Bournemouth’s former Debenhams – a doomed cathedral of sorts to the society of consumption which lies behind the Anthropocene - is an appropriate place to reflect on how we relate to nature. And there’s plenty of potential to read concerns about the future of nature into the work of the twelve artists gathered here.”
NatureMax features work by Saelia Aparicio, Rebecca Byrne, Theo Ellison, Tessa Farmer, Andy Harper, Sandra Kantanen, Matt Hale, Julie Maurin, Alan Rankle, Kelly Richardson, Toby Tatum, Esther Teichmann.
NatureMax opens on 15/11/21 and there is a opening celebration on 20/11/21, from 6-8pm. The exhibition runs until the 13/02/22.
NatureMax is documented here.
Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris - October 2021
Toby Tatum’s 2013 film Monsters has been programmed for the 23rd edition of the Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, screening in a programme of works for children. Programmer and presenter Judit Naranjo Ribó states that:
“If anything sets experimental cinema apart from the rest, it's its freedom. Freedom of formats, subjects, delusions. The Collectif Jeune Cinéma catalogue keeps track of it and we wanted to pay tribute to this total freedom through a program of films designed for the freest beings: children. It will be a two-and-a-half-part program. The first will be projected in 16mm. The second part will invite us to enter a magical garden populated by colours and animals. In the end, colour will invade the screen and close this session with a classic of painting on film”.
The screening includes films by Moira Tierney, Érik Bullot, Patrick Rebeaud et Eric Reynier, Toby Tatum, Calypso Debrot, Elena Duque, Stan Brakhage.
06/10/2021, 14:30
La Halle des Épinettes, Paris.
13/10/2021, 14:30
Cinéma Le Grand Action, Paris.
For more information about the Jeune Publics screenings and the Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris can be found here.
Barometer - BY ART MATTERS 之馆 - October-November 2021
Toby Tatum’s 2017 film The Signal has been programmed for Barometer, a project at BY ART MATTERS 之馆 in OōEli, Hangzhou, China.
Each season Barometer presents different new media works which are closely tied to daily life and the atmosphere of OōEli. Beginning in Spring 2021, Barometer will screen work related to the current solar term. According to the project’s curator’s:
“The solar term is a time scale of nature. The phenological changes it represents constantly affect our feelings and lifestyle. To some extent, Barometer will become a calendar made of video works -- each showing a specific moment in time, alerting us to the changes that are happening around, and surprising us within the general cycle of urban life”.
The Signal will be on display from 23rd October to 6th November 2021.
More information about the Barometer project is online here.
The Tree of Life - September 2021
A new print by Toby Tatum will feature as part of The Tree of Life exhibition at Electro Studios Project Space in St Leonards on Sea, UK. This comprehensive exhibition includes work of 60 artists, many of whom have close connections to the East Sussex area. The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue designed and printed by the estimable Silverhill Press. The catalogue features a forward by writer Edward Lucie-Smith.
The print features an image that emerged during the editing of Toby Tatum’s 2020 film The Butterfly. More information about the exhibition and ESPS is online here.
SIMULTAN Festival - September 2021
Toby Tatum’s 2020 film The Butterfly screens at SIMULTAN Festival in Timesoara, Romania. The 16th edition of the SIMULTAN Festival will take place between September 11-19, 2021 under the motto Unstable State of Things.
SIMULTAN is an annual festival dedicated to interdisciplinary arts – emerging media projects, experimental music and audio-visual and sound projects, in order to support new forms of artistic expression. The festival program includes live audio-visual performances, video art screenings, exhibitions, conferences and workshops.
The festival’s curation team passionately state that: “Life, as we knew it, is changing radically and probably someday will take a different form, providing a good opportunity to test ourselves and develop our ability to adapt to reality. It is important to understand not only what is happening, but also what is the potential of this transformation of the world following this crisis. The most difficult thing is to tolerate uncertainty and the unknown… in a world where we have come to believe that we have control, but nature proves otherwise. Learning to tolerate insecurity and the unknown brings us closer to our human condition, fragile and precarious as it is. And the sign is, perhaps, to become human again, that is, to allow ourselves to be vulnerable, fragile, dependent on each other. It is a time to look to the future and imagine what we want our lives to look like from now on”.
More information about the programme is online here.
Solaris Summer Exhibition - August - October 2021
A new print by Toby Tatum features as part of the Solaris Summer Exhibition. The print features an image from his film The Blue Flower. The print has been issued on archival quality Hahnemühle Museum Etching paper and is available for sale in an edition of 25 (+ 2 APs). More information about the exhibition is online here.
The Solaris Summer Exhibition also features prints by:
Hermione Allsopp, Tom Banks, Alexander Brattell, Rowan Corkill, Zoe Childerley, Nigel Green, Gerard Hemsworth, David Henderson, Jane Hilton, Patrick Adam Jones, Garth Lewis, Susan Ormerod, Overlap, Kim L Pace, Nicholas Pace, Danny Pockets, Alessandro Raho, Mario Rossi, Geraldine Swayne, Susan Taylor, Lucinda Wells.
Private View Saturday 21st August, 2pm to 8pm
Open Tuesday to Friday, 1pm to 5pm, Saturday 11am to 5pm
Exhibition runs until Saturday 2nd October
Solaris Print Ltd.
Fine Art & Photographic Giclée Printing
76 Norman Road, St Leonards-on-Sea, TN38 0EJ, UK
The Garden - 花園 - Islands - August 2021
Toby Tatum’s 2019 film The Garden features as part of Islands, a Taiwan / UK moving image festival, that will take place in August via newsletter. Every week a programme of films and letters will be emailed straight to audiences.
Programmers Wen HSU and Slow Film Festival have initiated this festival with the following communiqué:
“Taiwan and the United Kingdom are island nations. Despite a seven-hour time difference, despite a distance of 6,069 miles, and despite the English Channel, the Taiwan Strait and all the intervening seas and oceans, both nations share a certain sensibility. Their identities are formed by their ‘islandness’, whether that be through their peripherality, or maritime culture, or their contentious relations with continental neighbours. During these strange times of isolation, our own sense of island-living has come to the fore; so too has our need to communicate. Through this programme we invite you, therefore, to embark on journeys to the islands of others and to share in an exchange with people and cultures next door and on the far side of the world.”
The Garden is probably Toby Tatum’s most formally radical work to date. The film, at fifteen minutes in duration, is also his longest, inviting the spectator to fully immerse themselves in a shimmering, drowned world. During the film one paradoxical garden transitions, under the cover of weird night, into another, even stranger garden, where the rocks and flowers subtly glow with supernatural fire.
Sign up to the communication stream here.
The Loom - 50 ans de Collectif Jeune Cinéma - June 2021
In 2021, the Paris-based film distributors Collectif Jeune Cinéma will celebrate their 50th anniversary. To celebrate, CJC will take up residency at Mains d'Œuvres (Saint-Ouen, near Paris) in order to present more than a third of their entire catalogue of films in a unprecedented series of almost 80 screenings. The screening programmes have been created from CJC’s distribution catalogue and have been programmed in reverse chronological order, according to the production date of each film. These screenings invite you to go back in time through more than a third of CJC’s distributed films, from 2020 to 1943.
Toby Tatum’s 2018 film The Loom will screen in programme #6. The film will be screened on Saturday, 12th June at 4:30 PM.
For more information about CJC’s 50th anniversary film season visit: http://www.cjcinema.org
The Butterfly - Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival - 29th April - 3rd May, 2021
The Butterfly premieres at the 2021 Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, screening throughout the festival as part of A THING THAT HOLDS SOMETHING ELSE, Alchemy’s new exhibitions programme.
The exhibition’s curators describe A THING THAT HOLDS SOMETHING ELSE as:
“A series of ten video works, available on loop for the duration of the festival, hovers between closeness and containment. The works presented here are trapped in cyclical states – bound to the banalities of domestic maintenance, released from the comforting embrace of a cocoon, in conversations that never reach conclusion, inhabiting constrained bodies, enraged bodies, disguised bodies… while a cursor yearns to touch hilltops”.
The exhibition also features new work by Avner Pinchover, Eva Wang, Aminder Virdee, Panteha Abareshi, Ellie Kyungran Heo, Lauren Heckler, Toby Parker Rees, Vardit Goldner, Sweætshops.
A THING THAT HOLDS SOMETHING ELSE is curated by Rachael Disbury, Michael Pattison, Alix Rothnie, Shuge Xing for Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival.
For more information about the exhibition visit:
https://alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk/festival-2021-exhibition/…
Blacklands - Damp Moss - March 2021
Blacklands (2018) screens online throughout March as part of Damp Moss, a programme of artists’ moving image works curated by Christopher Thompson for HATERS.
Damp Moss also features work by: Ross Meckfessel | Emily Drummer | Gloria Chung | Alex OB | Miles Sprietsma | @menwithapot | @tornadotitans | @jordanjeppe
Damp Moss is online here.
Lost Gardens - The World With and Without Us - February 2021
Toby Tatum’s Lost Gardens (2017) screens throughout February as part of The World With and Without Us, a programme of films curated and presented by the visionary cineastes at Moving Image Artists. The World With and Without Us also features moving image works by Peter Treherne, Daniel & Clara, Amy Cutler, Katie McFadden, Edwin Rostron, Susu Laroche, and Scott Barley. The works, framed by a thoughtful essay by the project’s curators, are online here.
Night on the Riverbank - The Bluest Hour - Transient Visions - November 2020
Toby Tatum’s 2019 film Night on the Riverbank will screen in November as part of the Transient Visions film festival. The 2020 edition of this New York State-based film festival will be presented online. Transient Visions runs from October 23 to November 19, 2020 (there will be four programs in total, and each program will be available for the duration of one week). Night on the Riverbank streams as part of The Bluest Hour, a programme of films curated by Taylor Dunne. The Bluest Hour will be available to stream worldwide from 06/11/20 to 12/11/20. The programme also includes work by Sarah Lasley, Zachary Epcar, Masha Vlasova, Michael Mersereau, Marina Landia, and Jinyong Kim.
For more information about Transient Visions visit: http://www.transientvisions.org/
A World Assembled - Everything is Undone. The Centre Cannot be Sustained - October 2020
A World Assembled (2013) screens at Casa Bosques, Mexico City, on 03/10/20 as part of Everything is Undone. The Centre Cannot be Sustained.
The programme includes work by Anna Brody, Adam Chodzko, María José Crespo, Tessa Garland, Edwin Rostron, Marcos Serafím, and Bella María Varela.
Curated by Thomas Vann Altheimer and Mariel Miranda.
The Signal - MATERIAL SYNTHESIS - August / September 2020
Toby Tatum’s 2017 video The Signal beams forth as part of Material Synthesis, an online exhibtion at Diffractive Media Space curated by Eric Souther, who describes the exhibition below:
“Material Synthesis is an exhibition showcasing experimental media that engages diffractive vs representational approaches to moving images and works that utilise technology as a diffractive lens to investigate alternative ways of seeing and making. Material Synthesis is kin to the historical video art genera of signal processing, and operates within the New Materialism movement, specifically Agential Realism, which is the entanglement of matter and meaning.”
Material Synthesis also includes work by Benjamin Rosenthal, Sara Bonaventura, Jason Bernagozzi, Wrik Mead, Marcos Serafim, Karl Erickson, Enzo Cillo, Richard Hoagland, Michael Betancourt, Ollie Poppert, Michael Fleming, Andrew Deutsch.
MATERIAL SYNTHESIS runs until 25/09/20 and can be accessed here.
O Jardim / The Garden - Festival ECRÃ - August 2020
Toby Tatum’s The Garden (2019) will be planted at the forthcoming Festival ECRÃ. Owing to the Covid-19 pandemic the Rio de Janeiro-based festival will now take place online, accessible worldwide from 20th-30th August 2020. The Garden aims to open a window onto a realm of enchantment, where wraiths flicker on moss-bearded rocks, rain washes the spoor-filled air and metamorphic flowers glow with supernatural potency. The Garden is Toby Tatum’s most expansive work in terms of duration. Over the protracted fifteen-minute running time very little happens: one static scene transitions into another under the cover of encroaching darkness. If you take the time to peer closer though, you will see that among the shadowy rocks and swaying flowers teems a multitude of phosphorescing phenomena.
The Garden will beam forth via Festival ECRÃ’s Instagram account. The showing will be followed by a Live Q&A with Toby Tatum and curator Ana Albuquerque.
The screening will take place on 28/08/2020 (Friday), 15h (Brazilian Time) / 19h (UK Time), Duration 1h.
The post-screening discussion with curator Ana Luiza Albuquerque and Toby Tatum is archived here.
Mental Space - Greenness is a Kind of Grief - May 2020
Greeness is a Kind of Grief
Instagram Private View - Friday the 15th of May, from 6pm
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
From The Trees by Philip Larkin, 1967
Toby Tatum’s 2014 film Mental Space features as part of Greenness is a kind of Grief, a virtual exhibition curated by the artists Kate Street and Rhys Trussler. The curators describe the show as follows:
Greenness is a Kind of Grief brings together fourteen artists whose work deals with our difficult relationship with nature. Spring is often perceived as a time of rejuvenation and optimism, however as within the 1967 poem The Trees by Philip Larkin, there is often the underlying anxiety and acknowledgment that renewal is inevitably followed closely by demise.
Changing seasons lend themselves perfectly to bitter sweet meanderings – of our mortality and passing of time, to our relations with others and our immediate and past situations. The acceptance of the unfathomable natural processes constantly at work is a theme played out time and time again by artist, writers and musicians.
Many of the artists in the show adopt Larkin's observational stance of drawing out the melancholic realism within natural processes via forms of depiction or mimicry while others take a more sideways look at our complex relations with shifting seasons. What all the artists share in common, despite their varying approaches, is the commentary on our predicament, and a paradoxical response to demise through making.
Originally intended to be the inaugural show at Y.A.R.D. Project Space in Brighton, however due to the pandemic the exhibition will now exist online through Instagram and will also be presented as a digital catalogue that will be released two weeks after the launch and available for download. The context for the exhibition seems even more relevant and poignant now than since its original conception.
Featuring the work of:
Rob Branigan, Katie Brookes, Amanda Couch, Tom Gallant, Andrea Gregson, Fiona Long, Eigil Nordstrøm, Suzanne O’Haire, Nick Scammell, Kate Street, Mircea Teleagã, Toby Tatum & Abi Fry, Rhys Trussler.
Visit the exhibition here: https://www.instagram.com/y.a.r.d._projects/
Night on the Riverbank - Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival - May 2020
The 2020 edition of the wonderful Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival will take place as an online event, with the festival’s streaming programmes accessible to all.
Toby Tatum’s 2019 film Night on the Riverbank has been selected to screen as part of the festival.
Night on the Riverbank will screen in the programme Shorts: Seeing Comes before Words. According to the festival catalogue this programme looks at “exploring the limits of perception, including non-human viewpoints, vertical features and the challenges of filming architecture.”
The programme streams on: SATURDAY 2 MAY, 17:00 – 17:55 BST and is accessible here.
Alt/Kino presents Human, Nature
Alt/Kino have curated Human,Nature, an online streaming programme that can be enjoyed from the “dis/comfort of self-isolation”. The programmer Ben Nicholson enthusiastically states “I've long harboured a desire to curate a mini-festival about our relationships with, and perceptions of, the natural world and this can perhaps be considered a long-lead prelude inspired by being stuck in the house and largely restricted to bird-watching through the glass in my back door. I like the juxtapositions and echoes that appear when you watch shorts together in the close proximity of a programme, so I've imagined this as something that can be watched in one sitting (it's just under 70 minutes in length overall) but it's entirely up to you if any/all of it takes your fancy - feel free to dip in and out and skip as you please. Enjoy Human, Nature.”
The programme includes Toby Tatum’s film The Secluded Grove (2012), alongside films by Karen Johannesen, Margaret Salmon, Jill Godmilow, Neozoon Collective, Kate Lain, Ken Jacobs, Jesse McLean, Jacques Perconte, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Amy Cutler. The programme also features a topical excerpt from an episode of Big Bang Theory.
The Human, Nature programme is online to watch here.
Collectif Jeune Cinéma - Now Streaming Online
In response to the Covid-19 crisis Paris-based distributor Collectif Jeune Cinéma have programmed a collection of films for streaming online for free. CJC state “to make the confinement a little more pleasant, we have made available more than 250 films from our distribution catalogue, accessible here. A large majority of these films will remain available after the confinement”. Toby Tatum’s films Monsters, The Green Mind and A World Assembled (all 2013) have been included in the selection.
Fracto Experimental Film Encounter - Programme Streaming Online
The Berlin-based Fracto Experimental Film Encounter have put their 2019 festival programme online to stream. Fracto state that “in an effort to do all we can under the current circumstances, we will make part of 2019’s programme available to stream directly from our website. The streaming programme starts on the 27th of March, and will be available for the course of a week”.
Toby Tatum’s film Blacklands (2018) is streaming as part of the Summoning Bell programme, which is online here.
Magie / Animalité - Blacklands - Les Inattendus (The Unexpected) - February 2020
Toby Tatum’s 2018 film Blacklands has been selected to screen as part of the Magie / Animalité programme at Les Inattendus Film Festival in Lyon, France. The Magie / Animalité programme also includes work by film-makers Karel Doing and Esther Urlus, among others. The Magie / Animalité screening takes place on 15/02/20.
Blacklands takes the viewer on a haunting journey through a succession of weird landscapes, where paradoxical ruins are darkened by obscure foreboding and unearthly creatures hover on a threshold between worlds. The accompanying soundtrack by composer Abi Fry features an eerie collage of ominous funeral bells and lulling hypnotic choirs. In Blacklands, a burning lizard stands guard over a liminal zone of shadowy caverns and crumbling follies where inexplicable fires smoulder on smashed masonry.
Night on the Riverbank - London Short Film Festival - January 2020
Toby Tatum’s 2019 film Night on the Riverbank has been selected to premiere at the 17th edition of the London Short Film Festival. Night on the Riverbank screens on 11/01/20 as part of the Peripheral Visions programme, showing at the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA), London.
Night on the Riverbank was created through reworking footage from a forgotten B&W children’s programme. The film takes us into the nocturnal world of the little creatures that live on the riverbank, shown emerging from their hiding places to bask in the glow of an immense enchanting moon. The activities of these spellbound animals is soundtracked by a magical new score by composer Abi Fry. A review of Night on the Riverbank has been recently posted on the Italian film blog L’emergere del Possibile, where the film is considered alongside my other recent works. The article proposes that the film was conjured via invocation, issuing forth from beyond the grave: Night on the Riverbank “è un film che sembra provenire direttamente dall'oltretomba”.
For more information about the Peripheral Visions screening visit the LSFF website here.
The L’emergere del Possibile article is online to read here: https://tinyurl.com/y5p7nyv9
