Jo Ann Kaplan

Times are hard for little Sofia, as the Greek recession is taking its toll. With her Father out of work, they rely solely on Greedy Grumpy Granny's pension. Desperate times call for desperate measures; to what extremes will they go, when Granny is no more?

Face of an Angel is inspired by Puccini’s opera La Fanciulla del West, set during the Californian gold rush. The film is shot is the scarred black landscape of an open cast mine in South Wales, one of the original coal mining areas which fuelled the industrial revolution in Britain. Taking the theme of redemption, the film depicts choreographed yellow dumper trucks, portraits of miners and an escape to another life using the painterly surface of low format video. Fragments of music from the opera are woven into an industrial sound track.

Directed by Jo Ann Kaplan.

Directed by Jo Ann Kaplan.

A man wakes one day to find a zip on the front of his body. Dare he see what's inside?

"An Anatomy of Melancholy" is a cinematic meditation on mortality which takes the form of a special anatomy book - one in the process of being made. As hand-drawn illustrations appear slowly and painfully on the pages of the book, showing us parts of a dissected human body, we witness both the act of creation and a testament to our own passing. Accompanying the simple but powerful images of the human body, we hear the words of Keats' Ode on Melancholy: "Ay, in the very temple of Delight. Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine..."

Experimental drama.

A woman sits alone in a bare white tiled bath, reading Georges Bataille’s ‘Story of the Eye.’ The bizarre events described in the text provoke a series of fantasies in which the room and its accoutrements become the stage and the woman the main player. As her dreams unfold in the liquid medium of the bath, she becomes the ‘eye’ of the story and her own body the object of its gaze. With a feminine hand, THE STORY OF I plucks Bataille’s central metaphor from its original context and re-invents its erotic vision from the inside out. The eye is the vagina, seen throught he blood, urine and tears, it looks at itself in a mirror.

The Holy Family Album, Angela Carter’s sacrilegious take on Christian iconography, was one of the points of inspiration for curator Marie Mulvey-Roberts for the Strange Worlds Exhibition. The programme conceives of the representation of Christ in Western art history as photos in God’s photo album, only God the Father is not in pictures because he is behind the camera, taking the photographs, “calling the shots”.

Maya Deren is a legend of avant-garde cinema. This authoritative biography of the charismatic filmmaker, poet and anthropologist features excerpts from her pioneering Meshes of the Afternoon and her unfinished documentary on Haiti, interviews with Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas, and recordings of her lectures. Narrated by actress Helen Mirren, this definitive documentary offers startling insights into one of the most intriguing, accomplished figures in cinema history.

Maya Deren is a legend of avant-garde cinema. This authoritative biography of the charismatic filmmaker, poet and anthropologist features excerpts from her pioneering Meshes of the Afternoon and her unfinished documentary on Haiti, interviews with Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas, and recordings of her lectures. Narrated by actress Helen Mirren, this definitive documentary offers startling insights into one of the most intriguing, accomplished figures in cinema history.