Maggie Ellis

Cabbage

An intimate film made in collaboration with the filmmaker's family, Cabbage looks at the complexities of bodily autonomy within an ableist paradigm. Taking place in the months leading up to an international move from Canada back home to Ireland – a country they had to leave a decade prior due to severe cuts in disability services – the film focuses on her brother’s writings using eye tracking technology and her mother’s memories to explore how we shape a sense of self under the pervasive weight of unspoken assumptions and fixed definitions that get placed onto bodies. Dissecting layers of language, agency and power, the film is a subtle examination of how a human life is measured and valued.

Paradise Lost?

After discovering that John Milton is buried within London's Barbican grounds, Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard reimagined his epic poem ‘Paradise Lost’ as part of Doug Aitken's Station to Station project. The piece uses the architecture and atmosphere of the Barbican to update the story, which is told in three parts.

Eyes To Me

Sophie goes on a killing spree in a candy-coloured world.

Stalk

A hungry rabbit is stalked by a lettuce.

Doubled Up

Sam Moore's Doubled Up tells of the shock and awe of finding out she was expecting twins. The film is an opulent and multi-faceted song of love, panic, fear and lots of nappies.

The Albatross

A ship sets sail on an epic voyage through malignant natural and supernatural elements from which one man alone survives. An adaptation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner illustrated by19th Century wood engravings which are animated by scratching directly into the surface of color filmstock. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with its message of ecological redemption has a curiously contemporary resonance, but it is at the level of the mythic that the poem has lasting relevance; for this epic tale of extraordinary events simply mirrors the struggle that each human being faces on their own in his or her life. -VDB