Swedenborg Film Festival 2019 with Chloe Aridjis: Use and Purpose

About

Refreshments will be served | Swedenborg House, 20- 21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH | FREE ADMISSION but please email avery@swedenborg.org.uk to book

The Swedenborg Film Festival culminates on Saturday 7 December 2019, with a double bill of films and readings led by guest judge Chloe Aridjis. A celebrated novelist, Aridjis is undertaking the Swedenborg Residency.

The co-curators of the SFF, Gareth Evans (Whitechapel Gallery) and Nora Foster (Frieze) have chosen a shortlist of ten from over 150 submissions. This year’s shortlisted artists are:

Yuan Kong, Nicolas Jimy Awashish, Nick Jordan, Georg Koszulinski, Maya Ramsay, Alexandra Kaucher, Sista Pratesi, Hope Tucker, Charlotte Pryce and Stephanie Barber.

A screening of Memory of Berlin (1998) by John Burgan will be accompanied by Aridjis’s readings from her award-winning, Berlin-based novel Book of Clouds. The film will be followed by the 2019 competition screening, featuring ten short films by international artists. Filmmakers were invited to submit works exploring the theme of Use and Purpose — the Swedenborgian idea that everything has a purpose to fulfil. At the close of the Festival, Aridjis will announce her chosen winner.

MEMORY OF BERLIN (John Burgan), UK/Germany, 1998, 76 mins.

‘I guess it’s about time for the First-Person film to become a genre by itself, and for historians to wonder why, as it had been at the roots of literature, it took so much time for the cinema to catch up. I don’t take any risk in predicting Memory of Berlin will be considered as a milestone on the road of the film-essay’. – Chris Marker

THE SWEDENBORG FILM FESTIVAL: Taking place over three evenings of films and readings, the 2019 Swedenborg Film Festival is co-curated by Gareth Evans (Whitechapel Gallery) and Nora Foster (Frieze). The shortlist of ten has been selected from over 150 submissions. The Festival invites entries from the latest emerging and established talent of experimental and artistic film. Last year’s SFF was guest judged by the late multimedia artist Susan Hiller, and artists and writers including Ali Smith, Andrew Kötting, Jeremy Millar, Bridget Smith and Lech Majewski have judged and shown work at SFF.

CHLOE ARIDJIS is a London-based novelist and writer. Her most recent novel, Sea Monsters, was published in 2019 by Chatto & Windus, and was described by The Guardian as ‘precise, strange, evocative and wise’. Her 2009 novel Book of Clouds was published in eight countries and was awarded the French Prix du Premier Roman Étranger. Her 2014 novel Asunder was described by The Independent as ‘rapturous and enraptured reading’.

RSVP avery@swedenborg.org.uk