Blog & News

The season of slime comes round once more

It seems that the coming of autumn and the emergence of Creeping Garden screenings go hand in hand – so once again as summer wanes and the slime moulds stir, we can announce that The Margate Film Festival will be showing The Creeping Garden on Sunday 7th October at 3.30pm. And the films co-director Jasper Sharp will also be there to introduce the film. For more details follow the link here

 

 

Creeping Garden heads to AAVE Festival in Helsinki

The Creeping Garden returns to Finland this April 12th as part of the AAVE Festival  in Helsinki.

AAVE Festival is a yearly international event organized in Helsinki since 2010. Their mission is to represent, promote and showcase different forms of audiovisual arts and therefore rejoin different genres and audiences. This is not a mere film or media art festival but it aims at opening the gates into the vast world of moving image.

“The theme of the year 2018 is hauntology, haunting through media and memory. We introduce the theme via live cinema performances, screenings, exhibitions and a seminar. In our main screening series we will show the short works by the legendary pioneer of Japanese experimental documentary film, video art and avantgarde film Matsumoto Toshio and our qualified live cinema guest artists performances and surprising moving image works will light up the program with tempting, otherworldly shine.”

Labocine hosts a weekend of slime

This weekend on July 8th and 9th, we are delighted to announce that Labocine will be hosting The Creeping Garden as their special film pick online, and a chance to catch it free of charge for just two days only.

Labocine is an Imagine Science Films initiative to extend their film programming to a broader and diverse audience.

 

A Danish Summer of Slime at The Garden

We are delighted to announce that The Creeping Garden will have a run of screenings in Denmark this June and July at the Aros Triennial ‘The Garden – End of Times, Beginning of Times’ 

The film will be screening on –

June 5th, 12th, 19th, 26th 
July 3rd, 10th, 7th, 24th 

Its a real pleasure to be part of this massive and ambitious project and to be sharing a programme with work from such inspiring film makers.

BRIEFLY ON THE TRIENNIAL

The ARoS Triennial The Garden – End of Times, Beginning of Times thematises man’s coexistence with and view on nature, indicating how varying world views (religious, political, ideological, cultural, or scientific) have had an impact on how nature has been represented in art through the ages.

The Triennial consists of three sections (The Past, The Present, and The Future), which provide the structural framework of the exhibition. The Past examines the landscape and man’s relationship with nature from the perspective of art and the history of ideas, The Present looks at nature in a modern urban context, and The Future explores the artistic reaction to environmental changes. The Present and The Future will be open to visitors in June and July of this year.

Dates:

The Past (at ARoS): 8 April until 10 September 2017
The Present (in the city): 3 June until 30 July 2017
The Future (by the coast): 3 June until 30 July 2017

Creeping Garden makes it to Docudays UA, Kyiv, Ukraine.

I don’t think anyone is more surprised than we are as to the sheer longevity of The Creeping Garden’s life cycle on the international film festival circuit. Almost three years after its premiere at Fantasia in July 2014 and in the midst of a new wave of reviews and press attention for the Blu-ray/DVD release, we were delighted for the film to be invited to the fabulous Docudays UA in Kyiv, Ukraine.

It screened on Tuesday 28 March in the imposing Cinema House to a sold-out audience, included as part of the festival’s special ‘Homo Science’ focus, which also featured Werner Herzog’s Lo & Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (2016) and Taggart Siegel and Jon Betz’ Seed: The Untold Story (2016). 

This time it was my (Jasper Sharp) turn to accompany The Creeping Garden, and I thoroughly enjoyed the warm reception from the festival organisers and the audience, who greeted both me and the film enthusiastically. Many stayed on for the post-screening Q&A, moderated by Kiril Beskorovayny, the editor of Kunsht a beautifully designed new print magazine, (sadly Ukrainian language only) that takes as its starting point the philosophy that science is art.

I enjoyed some fascinating chats with some of the audience members over the following days, and in general was really impressed with the levels of attendances, enthusiasm and engagement that greeted all the films screened. 

Alas, three days at a festival rarely affords much time to sample much more than a tiny fraction of the programme, but it never really seems worth travelling far for a film festival without taking time to explore the city in question. Kyiv is certainly a welcoming place, although not one we get much of an impression of from the British media. I was massively impressed by its accessibility, its majestic architecture and a strong sense of a rich history, which I am embarrassed to confess, I know all too little about (it’s one of the oldest cities in Eastern Europe). It’s far cheaper to get to than I imagined, and incredibly reasonably priced when you’re there. 

During my walking tour of the city, I noted the bitter irony that while I was standing in the awe-inspiring Maidan Nezalezhnosti – the square at the heart of the city that hit international headlines in 2014 when around 100 people died during the clash between pro-European Union protestors and police that marked the climax of the Revolution of Dignity – our Prime Minister was in the very city to which we both accompanied our film just two years ago for its screening at Offscreen to begin the formal process of our own country’s departure from the EU.   

Events such as Docudays UA really emblemise the spirit of open-mindedness and international cooperation and collaboration that we aimed to celebrate in The Creeping Garden. I am most certain that this won’t be my last time in Ukraine, nor at the festival itself.