Second Sight: Dreaming Rivers at GSFF20

A key film of the UK Black Film Workshop Movement, Martina Attille’s Dreaming Rivers (1988) illustrates the spirit of modern families touched by the experience of migration. Awarded a prestigious Filmdukaten at the XXXVII Internationale Filmwoche Mannheim in 1988, the film evocatively weaves together the ambition-fuelled dreams and memories of Caribbean-born Miss T and her family.

Dreaming Rivers will be screened alongside two films by Glasgow based artist, filmmaker and programmer, Tako Taal, who will also introduce the screening.

Second Sight: Dreaming Rivers streams live as part of Glasgow Short Film Festival at 21:30 on Wednesday 19 August only, and will not be available on demand after this time.

Martina Attille is currently an AHRC TECHNE PhD Candidate at UAL LCC, registered in her preferred name, Judah.

Tako Taal is a Welsh-­Gambian visual artist and filmmaker, currently undertaking a two­-year residency with Talbot Rice Gallery at the University of Edinburgh.

Taal navigates historic and neocolonial forms to consider strategies for recovery and repair. As a material performance of belonging her work evokes cited, spectral and physical bodies to undermine History, destabilise images and disrupt identity. Taal exercises her body to enter diasporic and imperial lacuna, in the belief that the labour undertaken to straddle a gap is critical to its understanding. Whispered anecdotes and artefacts from family archives are navigated and reconstructed to trace shifts that merge and split boundaries between body, land and state.

From 2016­-18 Tako was a programmer at Market Gallery, Glasgow. Her films have been in competition at the 14^th Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival and Glasgow Short Film Festival. Recent exhibitions include; Inherited Premises, Grand Union (Birmingham) and Compound, Intermedia Gallery, CCA Glasgow.

The Black Film Workshop Movement developed throughout the 1980s, a pivotal decade in UK culture and society. Against a backdrop of divisive national politics and civil unrest, a series of radical filmmaking collectives sprung up.

Their films explored the Black community’s relationship to Britain’s colonial past; whilst also looking to the Civil Rights movement in America, Black feminism, Pan-Africanism, the struggle of apartheid, and the emergent fields of postcolonial and cultural studies.

Second Sight incorporates key archive films from the period as well as new commissions from contemporary film artists, created in response to the Workshop context.