Past Event
The acclaimed and profoundly engaged film-maker and artist presents two of her powerful and unsettling documentary films, Going to the Dogs and Same Road Different Road, which investigate the discrepancies of our relationship to animal cruelty and the often fatal divergences in neighbourhood experience. She will be in extended conversation with Andrea Luka Zimmerman after the screening.
A Statement by Penny Woolcock on tonight’s programme:
“Same Road Different Road is a a 10 minute steadicam shot down a road in North London road with overlapping voice overs, from an older woman, and a young man, for whom the same walk is a dangerous venture in a war zone. Who is vulnerable here?
With Going to the Dogs, I wondered whether it was possible to make a thoughtful film about dog fighting. Our relationship to animals is generally one of cruelty and enslavement but our responses are shaped by perceptions of social class. I was heavily trolled after this film by people who thought I was disgusting and should have acid thrown in my face.”
NOTE: This programme contains material some viewers might find distressing
Thanks to Modern Art Oxford and the Wellcome Trust for Same Road Different Road, and to Channel 4 and Latimer for Going to the Dogs.
Part of Not Just Me but You Too: Cinemas of Sisterhood, April 2019 – April 2020.
This year-long season of films, entirely by women and gender non-binary filmmakers, covers artists’ and experimental film, documentary and essay film, alongside filmmaker appearances, readings, discussion and guest speakers. Expect programmes dedicated to particular makers, themed programmes with contemporary artists and celebrations of key feminist thinkers, all in dialogue with Pages Cheshire Street, a new independent bookshop dedicated to women and non-binary writers.
Penny Woolcock is primarily but not exclusively a filmmaker, moving around in a liminal space in between fiction and documentary. She likes to initiate her own projects but sometimes direct other people’s stories. She has directed operas at the Met in New York and the Coliseum in London and for Streetwise Opera who work with homeless people. She has also made work for gallery spaces and recently had a retrospective exhibition at Modern Art Oxford. She loves to dive into lives that are being lived around the edges, to look at what can seem familiar and make it extraordinary , to look at what appears bizarre and make it accessible.
Andrea Luka Zimmerman is an artist, film-maker and cultural activist. Her work is concerned with marginalisation, co-existence, waywardness, social justice, class and structural violence. Films include the Artangel-produced Here for Life (2019), which had its world premiere in the Cineasti Del Presente international competition of the Locarno Film Festival (receiving a Special Mention), Erase and Forget (2017), Estate, a Reverie (2015) and Taskafa, Stories of the Street (2013), written and voiced by the late John Berger. Exhibitions include Civil Rites, the London Open, Whitechapel Gallery and Common Ground, Spike Island, Bristol.
