A historic East End venue will host a special film screening in a bid to raise awareness around disability.
A series of short films chosen by the artist-run organisation Mascara Film Club will be shown at Newington Green Meeting House on 28 January as part of its arts and culture programme, Arts on the Green.
The screening is one event forming the 23rd annual London Short Film Festival (LSFF), which will see 300 works screened across the capital between 23 January and 1 February. Each of the films has been chosen around the theme of ‘Cinema Remembers What We Forget’ and will explore how artists confront memory and identity.
Kasia Łukasik, Daisy Smith and Rufus Rock of Mascara Film Club told East End Review they chose the theme of disability after “reflecting on the current political climate surrounding [the] slashing of disability benefits in the UK”.
“We felt that we wanted to engage with perspectives that address the lived experience of these often marginalised groups,” they told us.
“This screening, through different registers, engages with a nuanced perspective of fatigue, illness, alternative forms of care, and diagnosis.”
The six films on show at the Meeting House range in length from 5-25 minutes and explore “how language, communication and meaning circulate around disability, deafness, and chronic illness”. Each aims to “interrogate modes of speaking and listening”, as well as exploring lip-reading as “a mode of resistance”. The films will be played with descriptive subtitles and a British Sign Language (BSL) interpretation will be provided for the introduction.
The evening kicks off at 7.30pm with A Raised Voice, Amplified. Featured filmmakers include Lucy Clout, Leah Clements, Jordan Lord, and Jenny Brady.
London-based artist Clements described her film, Protection, as “a video portrait” of a woman who falls asleep as a coping mechanism during stressful situations. “The film seeks to ask questions about what forms of coping, self-defense, and self-protection are considered acceptable, by whom, and for whom,” Clements told East End Review.
“As a projection, the room grows light and falls into darkness in time with the protagonist opening and closing their eyes, so the audience is immersed in this experience of repeated loss and regaining of consciousness.”
Protection also features a looped audio clip from the 1993 documentary Multiple Personalities: The Search for Deadly Memories, which tells the story of a woman named Gretchen who uses different personalities to shield herself from past trauma.
Łukasik, Smith and Rock say the film club has a “longstanding relationship” with Newington Green Meeting House, which is now home to the Unitarian congregation New Unity, “a radically inclusive community of love and justice”.
“We have previously held screenings at the Newington Green Meeting House,” they added. “We hope to be joined by many new faces for what promises to be a very special screening.”
New Unity launched Arts on the Green in September 2024. It says it is “committed to working with artists to provide flexible space that lets them bring radical art to the community”.
Long before New Unity moved in, the Meeting House was known for its radical past. Built in 1708, it is the oldest nonconformist place of worship still in use in London and was frequented by some of history’s best-known ‘dissenters’, most notably the author and feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft.
Philosopher, mathematician and nonconformist minister Richard Price was also a regular visitor, and hosted many other famous social reformers of the day there, including United States founding fathers Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.
The film screening takes place at Newington Green Meeting House on 28 January. Find out more here.
