ANYTHING MOVING

ANYTHING MOVING

Three films made by Esther & Kitchen Table Photo Club.

  • ‘Anything Moving is so good, so un-bossy in its artistry, so moving as portraits of children (and therefore portraits of all of us). Really I can’t think of any other account of childhood that doesn’t feel patronising by comparison. What it offers is profound, abundant and not quite graspable. I love it’.

    Alice Oswald - poet / gardener

  • ‘Woah. Unreal. Beautiful. And insanely psychedelic’.

    Eric Chenaux - songwriter / musician

  • ‘Mesmerising and unforgettable; this is magic in film editing. The sense of places and bodies over-layering, almost making contact, is explicit and palpable’.

    Emma Bush - artist / educator

  • ‘ I was excited to see young people sharing the same mottled space as wild animals – or seeming to, thinking that those people might become welded to their experience and be able to fight for what we are losing so fast. I felt the grief that the humans and the animals were somehow missing each other… while I was intoxicated by the way sound and image had been so beautifully and poetically manipulated. ‘.

    Mark - activist / gardener

  • ‘Anything Moving flickers and floats between realms, ever dissolving all that separates them. From the nooks of the deep forest, one’s imagination is invited to playfully wander between day and night, to times that have passed and moments that forever might be.‘

    Nick Bannerman - SuperNormal Festival

  • ‘I absolutely adore Anything Moving. All my senses are involved!’

    Kath Bloom - singer / songwriter

  • ‘Anything Moving tapped into a quiet, calm and content part of my brain (soul) and for those moments all the interference in my thoughts stopped and I drifted. It had a big impact on the daily struggle I have with my mental health. I’m always looking for things in the arts to help me find those moments of peace and this provided it perfectly’.

    Parent

  • 'For a while now I’ve been interested in the question of what would a re-wilded film look like? How could we find a film poetics that answered ecological awareness and allowed the world in all its plenitude to stay strange, pagan and mysterious? ...Anything Moving goes a long way to answering my question. [It] is feral, in form and in feel it’s a uniquely wild experience. All the creatures in the film insist on their own fantastically unknowable realities. Much of the piece is generated by movement activated trail cameras, so the action is in some senses controlled by the eco system in which the tech has been placed. There is some kind of post-human collaboration at work here. The action of the environment itself triggers content generation. Composed in black and white and night vision from movement activated trail cameras the heron, the fox, the deer and the child all share an equivalence in the ecology of the liminal woodland world of the film. The sounds of the film, the gorgeous scored pieces and the edgeland mixes of rushing wind, the distant city hum, pigeons, woodpeckers, the lonely crow and the strange half heard shouts of the children, take me to a very special place. The space where you have hunkered down in the woods on your own just to be in the wild, to get your nose down amongst the roots and the bugs, to feel the profound otherness of the land right down in your gut. To hope that nobody finds you. To be secret to yourself like the fox, the deer and the heron...'

    Jon Dovey - Emeritus Professor of Screen Media, UWE Bristol

Deep in the woods, Esther told stories of human, spirit and animal-kin to children. They played make-believe and tied camera traps to trees and rocks and waited like foxes, watched with Eagle Eyes and listened with deer ears. They recorded sounds of wind and trees and laughter. Creatures came and went, crossing paths unseen and then, after a year, Esther collaged forages footage into 3 x audio visual pieces that shatter boundaries between worlds.

With music from Bass Clef and Laura Cannell, sound recordings from Dave Howell, musical Tom Foolery with Tom Bugs, the films exhibit as single or multi-screen work. Showings include projections at Bridge Farm, single cinema screening at Supernormal and gallery screenings at Ballroom Arts.

Screenings:

STROUD VALLEY ARTS; BRIDGE FARM BRISTOL; SUPERNORMAL FESTIVAL OXFORDSHIRE; BALLROOM ARTS ALDEBURGH; EAST QUAY WATCHET; RAVENINGHAM SCULPTURE TRAIL NORFOLK; DARTINGTON ARTS DEVON; BUGS HQ BRISTOL; LONDON SHORT FILM FESTIVAL; WYE VALLEY RIVER FESTIVAL; MAYFEST BRISTOL

To book contact Esther May Campbell.

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