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Nov 2, 2024 at 11:30 am – 3:00 pm
Artistic Differences — Huw Wahl
Our monthly cineclub and podcast, hosted in-person and virtually
11 am — IRL Doors at UNDO
11:30am — Screening begins
(in-person & online)
1pm — CineClub Conversation
(in-person & online)
LOCATIONS
ARTISTIC DIFFERENCES, produced by UnionDocs and hosted by Cíntia Gil, is an online cineclub, hosted on the first Saturday of every month! Join in to add your voice to the cineclub conversations! All UnionDocs members can join in person in Ridgewood, and if you’re tuning in from afar, you can join our livestream or sign up for a link to stream on your own time.
We think of our gatherings as an open brain trust of folks from all around the world, who gather regularly to thoughtfully consider challenging documentary works and generate brave questions and candid responses that fuel dialogue around the work of some of the most poetic and powerful filmmakers exploring the documentary form today. Join us to WATCH urgent and expressive films, DISCUSS new contexts, voices, visions, and ideas across many differences, and LISTEN to open and honest conversations with the artists.
This November, we’re delighted to spotlight the work of Huw Wahl! His film The Republics (2020) is anchored in the biography of translator and activist Stephen Watts. It explores the larger truths of being and the calibrations of response to often hard earned, lived experience.
After our convening, we produce a longform interview with the filmmaker in question as a podcast episode. We bring to them the many questions, ideas and thoughts that emerge from our meeting with all of you. If this community-based generative format of dialogue and exchange piques your interest, join the club today!
Program
The Republics by Huw Wahl
83 mins, 2020
For four decades, poet, translator and activist Stephen Watts has been the quietly urgent, profoundly committed voice of the marginalised and the overlooked, whether person or place. Now he has found his collaborative equal in the engaged 16mm filmmaker Huw Wahl, who has translated the text of Watt’s book-length prose poem Republic Of Dogs/Republic Of Birds into a luminous feature-length documentary essay of remarkable beauty and spirited attention. Anchored in Watts’ biography and lines, it explores the larger truths of being and the calibrations of response to often hard earned, lived experience. Considering the changing landscapes of settlement in London’s East End and Scottish islands, the destruction of working-class culture and an attendant sense of the collective, the film and its writing are themselves forms of cultural activism: elegy, celebration and a toolkit for ongoing resistance. Never rhetorical, always endowed with a profound empathy and a deep sense of relation – to time, place and human struggle – The Republics is one of the most impressive artists’ films of recent years, whose own poetry speaks as honestly and eloquently as that of the writer it portrays.
– Gareth Evans, Moving Image Curator, Whitechapel Gallery
Program Duration: 83 mins
Watch the conversation between Presenter1, Presenter2 and Presenter 3 on the UnionDocs’ Membership hub.
Bios
The work of Huw Wahl has been screened internationally at film festivals such as CPH:DOX, Festival du nouveau cinéma and Open City Docs, in art galleries and museums like Centre Pompidou Metz, Royal Museums Greenwich and the Whitworth, as well as in universities, social centres and at music festivals.
He has won several international awards with his films, and they’ve featured in magazines like Sight and Sound and The Wire, and received funding from organisations such as Arts Council England, The Henry Moore Foundation, and the Royal Photographic Society.
His writing has been published in magazines, academic journals and books. He has also curated film programmes, been part of international film festival juries, and taught film & photography courses in university and community settings in the UK and abroad.
Wahl has just completed an arts council and crowdfunded film that explores the art of engineless sailing, and is currently a Research Associate at the University of Manchester on the AHRC funded project Creative Adaptive Solutions for Treescapes Of Rivers (CASTOR).
Born in Portugal, Cíntia Gil studied at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema (Lisbon Theatre and Film School) and holds a degree in Philosophy from the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto (Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Porto), where she has also taught seminars on aesthetics. From 2012 to 2019, Cíntia Gil served as co-director and then director of Doclisboa, Portugal’s most important and steadily expanding documentary film festival, where she launched the Ibero-American lab Arché. From 2019 to 2021 she has directed Sheffield DocFest.
From the Event
