SET Film Festival 2025: ‘A Token, a Sign’, 6 November 2025
SFF presents a programme of films that attempt to decipher the latent meanings, codes, and symbols of landscape and place.
In these works, history and memory are inscribed in the contours of land and cityscapes as codes to be decrypted, mapping forgotten histories of dispossession, extraction, and trade, as well as more personal and idiosyncratic stories. Here, film becomes a taxonomic tool – measuring, but also mystifying – tracing routes into territories of myth, nationalism, enclosure, and erasure. The screening is followed by Q&A with the filmmakers, chaired by screening programmer Phoebe Campion.
‘Fire at Sea: an Evening with Julie Brook’, Judith E. Wilson Studio, Cambridge, May 2024
A screening of moving-image works by acclaimed British land artist Julie Brook, including films from her ‘Firestack’ cycle, unseen 8mm footage from her years living alone in a rock arch in the Isle of Jura, and recent sculptural works in quarry landscapes. The screening will be followed by a Q&A and conversation between Brook and the writer and programmer Phoebe Campion, discussing the role of sculpture, solitude and the moving image in her practice.
SET Film Festival 2024: ‘A Rich Seam’, November 2024
SFF presents a programme of films that explore the radical power of emulation, mirroring, and memorialising as tools to repair the past and to weave new futures.
Approaching film as a medium through which time can be unraveled and refabricated, these works bridge voids and fill in the blanks, stitching fictions into the margins of historical record and creating memorial devices for futures yet to come. From a queer reimagining of U.S. pioneer narratives to the braided strands of a mother and daughter’s genetic archive, and the restoration of architectural memory from the scraps of a war-torn territory, the works in this programme ask how film can uncover, re-stage, and intertwine forgotten histories and imagined memories. They offer, in the words of one, “No answer, but an echo.”
Film screening: ‘That Little sphere…’ Nature Films salon #01, Hundred Years Gallery, London, July 2019
‘Documentary Eco-Cinema: Witness & Extinction’. Post-screening discussion, chaired by writer Phoebe Campion.
(Programme: We Burn Daylight, Kathleen Bryson & Gwynfryn Thomas; Hilbre, Andrew Schonfelder; Working Bees, Night Rain, Sometimes it Rains in Paradise, Mervyn Diese; Exercises in Conscious Listening: Forest & Tonic Mass, Monika Tobel; Living and Dying on the Maescoed, Kate Kotchef; Hankering, Gross, Mystical, Nude, Alex Macdonald).
Monika Tobel, Tonic Mass, 2018