Two new films premiering at Alchemy Film Festival, Scotland

 

The first two filmic episodes from my multimedia project Covenant, will premiere April 3-6 at Scotland's Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival .  Alchemy is an international festival of experimental film and artists’ moving image held in the ex-industrial mill town of Hawick, in the Scottish Borders. The annual festival is themed each year, and focuses on screening work that relates to the natural world, to landscape and to humankind’s relationship with nature. The festival has a focus on high quality artistic projects and experimental short film, but also hosts thematically related feature length screenings.

I'll be premiering two short films: Gown of Repentance, which deciphers and interrogates the case of a woman publicly disciplined and shamed in 1677 by her kirk session (church court) for the sin of adultery. The only information we have of her case is found in the abbreviated written minutes left by West Calder's Kirk Session clerk.

What it is to Want It, a new two-channel room-sized installation, will run throughout the festival in a repurposed mill building.  What it is to Want It brings voice to the inner wrestlings of 17th century Scots whose worldviews were shaped by the sternly passionate and demanding ideals of the Scottish Reformation, and the rugged, unforgiving land that sustained them.