About
Perestroika: Reconstructed, 2013 (180mins) re-mixes and extends Sarah Turner's acclaimed film of 2009, Perestroika, into two sequences. Combing the genres of documentary, essay film and film poem, Perestroika: Reconstructed melds two journeys taken on the Trans-Siberian railway twenty years apart. Part psycho-geography, part dream and part environmental allegory, the film explores the process of memory: both what we forget and how we remember. Sequence one constitutes the 2009 version of the film, whilst the second sequence constructs a new framing narrative that reinterprets and reconfigures both the imagery and the experience of the first.
Limited to views from the window of the Trans-Siberian train, both sequences of Perestroika: Reconstructed conclude at Lake Baikal, the world's deepest lake, contrasting experiences of terror and apocalypse with those of beauty and tranquility, the one contaminating the other. In this uncanny return, form stages theme through twinning the instability of the environment with the instability of memory and re-enacting that within the projective experience of cinema. This extended work delves further into ideas of momentary truth, identity and how an uncontaminated experience of landscape is literally and metaphorically something that only exists in memory.
Sarah Turner is an artist, filmmaker, writer, curator and academic. Her feature films include Ecology, UK, 97mins (2007), Perestroika, UK, 118mins (2009) and short films include Overheated Symphony, UK, 10mins, orchestrated for Birds Eye View Film Festival 2008, Cut, 17 mins (2001) was broadcast on Channel 4, and A Life in a Day with Helena Goldwater, 20mins (1996) and Sheller Shares Her Secret, 8 mins, (1994) both headlined Midnight Underground when they were also broadcast on Channel 4. Sarah has had feature scripts commissioned by the BFI, Film Four Lab and Zephyr Films. Amongst other curatorial projects, Turner produced (with Jon Thomson) the launch programme for Lux Cinema in 1997; Hygiene and Hysteria: The body desired and the body debased, a touring programme of artists' film and video for Arts Council England and programmes for Tate and the National Film Theatre. She is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Kent.
Screening dates: 23, 24*, 27 & 30 April and 2, 7, 8 & 10* May
*24 April and 10 May followed by Q&A with Sarah Turner. Tickets are free, booking essential, as places are limited. www.carrollfletcher.eventbrite.com. Note that due to the linear narrative of the film, it is recommended that it is viewed in its entirety.
