Dwindling membership, a crumbling club house, penniless coffers: The “Bradford Movie Makers” have seen better days. The active club members, most of them fairly advanced in years, sit there, basking in blissful memories and not mincing their words when they pick at the others’ film ideas over multiple cups of tea. Cineastes have met here every Monday since 1932 and can be proud of a ninety-year history including countless amateur films of all genres.

The “club”, as insiders call it, is a typical British working class film club: watching films together on a regular basis and spending every free minute on elaborate shoots including stunt riders and green screens. But the old veterans are beginning to get frail, the occasional death must be mourned. And then the pandemic comes on top of all this, darkening the only bright spot of the week. But it also brings unexpected surprises … Kim Hopkins manages the feat, despite a number of tragic-sad occasions, of avoiding the tear-jerker trap and gives us equally astonishing and funny insights into this pastime that’s far more than just a hobby. This quiet, funny and touching portrait of a band of film buffs – male and female – pays tribute to the need we all have to spend time together.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” The Bard’s canonical quote looms large over British experimental filmmaker John Smith’s latest short; one of the film’s opening gags even has Smith assert that one of his schoolmates, a certain William Shakespeare Smith, was allegedly bullied as much as he was. Saddled with one of the most generic monikers in the English language, the director talks about how this has affected his life and career over the last seven decades, pairing his deadpan voiceover with photographs, documents, snippets from his films and other pertinent images to often hilarious effect. His wry cataloguing of name-related humiliations also takes great pleasure in the tangential, as class, the state of the world today and mortality come to the fore again and again, with the intertitles providing an extra layer of self-deprecation that pushes the whole endeavour towards autofiction. Political, bracingly witty and quietly moving, “Being John Smith” ultimately suggests that humour combined with rigour and intelligence can transcend even the most fixed of categories; what could be sweeter than that?

Icelandic musician Björk has always merged natural and technoid creativeness. She samples and loops environmental sounds and transforms them by means of electronic effects. Paul White translates this approach and aesthetics in the video clip for “Hunter”, morphing the singing Björk’s head and human features into an artificial polar bear that seems to be made of liquid plastic.

The figure of the singer Björk seamlessly transforms into petals, into underwater creatures with delicate tentacles and other fantastic organic manifestations impossible to classify. Accompanying Tobias Gremmler’s graceful computer animation, Björk’s singing wipes the slate clean: tabula rasa, a free, unencumbered space for later-born children to blossom and make their own mistakes.

A rhythmic collage of sounds and filmed sequences accompanies the demolition of a house. People from a neighbourhood in East London report in interview fragments: The living conditions were not comfortable – ugh, those spiders! – but the families had a home that had grown over generations. Now the community protests against being squeezed out by a motorway network.

Bobby’s stomach is upset. She is ravenous. Normally, dinner should be on the table by now. But today everything is different. Mum lures her teenage daughter out of the house with a lie and takes her to hospital, where her relatives are already waiting. All dressed in black, with tears in their eyes, expressing their sympathy. But sympathy for what? Before Bobby realises what is going on, she is dragged into the endless corridors of the clinic by rude nurses, undressed and prepared for an operation she knew nothing about and never consented to.
Behind the scenes of this nocturnal horror trip, a disturbing tale about the relationship of trust between parents and children is revealed. Mansi Maheshwari’s genre mix of thriller, scary vision and educational satire is fascinating. Its dynamic design, dramatic animation and mesmerising soundtrack send us deep into a terrifyingly exquisite nightmare that lingers on.

The winter’s night draws its last breaths in the milky amber glow of the street lights. Snowflakes trickle down, the camera slowly circles a small guardroom in a driveway. Night after night, this lonely island is occupied by: Nobody. As a security guard in the cold, he guarantees the safety of the warm homes and their owners. He passes the time with a recalcitrant oil radiator, a calendar girl on a green meadow and his meandering thoughts. His security logs serve as a seismograph of reflections on life and nightly rounds of the square. Nobody is wrapped in a shell of coolness grown over a long time, which makes it hard for him to react to a rare smile the way he would like to in his heart.
Nadia Hallgren and Jamie-James Medina condense an autobiographical short story by artist and musician Willis Earl Beal aka “Nobody”. The actor Michael K. Williams, who died in 2021, lent his voice to this inner monologue and gives it a sleepy, melodious sound. In this very cinematic, melancholy piece in a state of limbo, casual observations open a philosophical cosmos. But every time the journey of the mind crashes on the tarmac of the carpark in front of the block of flats.