Elizabeth Benjamin

Sisters with Transistors

Think of early electronic music and you’ll likely see men pushing buttons, knobs, and boundaries. While electronic music is often perceived as a boys' club, the truth is that from the very beginning women have been integral in inventing the devices, techniques and tropes that would define the shape of sound for years to come.

Walkout 1

Some time after a mysterious weather event caused a cloud of sand from a faraway desert to settle over an unnamed city, this miasma of dust shows no sign of lifting. Clogging up the eyes and choking off the horizon, it has become a fact of everyday life. In a nondescript apartment somewhere in the city, a woman convenes a gathering at which a group of young people are present. Like every young generation, they are a repository of hope for the future – albeit a future that seems equally murky and obscured.

Leviathan Cycle, Episode 6: Ding Ling & Senait

Ding Ling is a research scientist who fled Indonesia in the wake of rising sea levels, and at the start of the episode disembarks from the cargo ship on which she had been living. She moves onwards to explore new/old territories, revealing something of her past in Indonesia and China via Singapore as the episode progresses. During her journey she meets the resourceful Senait, an Eritrean refugee who subsists by evaporating water from the Dead Sea to make it potable. In her ongoing effort to compile an archive of those who remain, Ding Ling records an interview with Senait, where Senait recounts her own peripatetic past and perilous journey through Sudan.

Leviathan Cycle, Episode 4: Jamila

Ben and Yasmine continue further south to the Moroccan coast, where they are attacked by Jamila and her group of parasitic bandits. The ethics of survival and predator-prey relationships in both human and marine species are explored, as members of another group intervene. But is this out of the frying pan and into the fire for the protagonists?

Leviathan Cycle, Episode 5: Ismael

Our protagonists are taken captive aboard a gigantic cargo ship, whose megalomaniacal captain Ismael entertains biblical pretensions. Ben is made to ‘pay his passage’, while a ghostly Yasmine stalks the empty corridors of the ship. Whales and whaling become a key subject – interrogating colonial and indigenous politics in the process.

Leviathan Cycle, Episode 3: Arturo

Ben and Yasmine arrive at a strange and enigmatic community based on an island in the lagoon of Venice. They engage in scavenging raids to the mainland and partake in the group’s Bacchanalian orgies. Their gluttonous sexual vagrancy is paralleled with images of overfishing and unnecessary cruelty in the fishing industry of the Mediterranean.

The Circle

A bold and lyrical portrayal of two brothers from inner-city London and the challenges they face daily, interpreted through dance.

Push

Housing prices are skyrocketing in cities around the world. Incomes are not. PUSH sheds light on a new kind of faceless landlord, our increasingly unliveable cities and an escalating crisis that has an effect on us all. This is not gentrification, it’s a different kind of monster.The film follows Leilani Farha, the UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, as she’s travelling the globe, trying to understand who’s being pushed out of the city and why. “I believe there’s a huge difference between housing as a commodity and gold as a commodity. Gold is not a human right, housing is,” says Leilani.

A River Holds a Perfect Memory

Bodies of water are intervened upon, moved, disrupted and exploited. Labouring bodies experience similar pressures from the same forces of power and extraction. Distant communities – Northern England and Jamaica – share similar histories of manipulation and oppression whose record is kept in the living memory of its waterways. But water, like people, can find a way to exert its own will.