if four is a riot, it is also a congress*

A response by Cicely Farrer to ​‘Maximum Tilt’, a festival of artists’ moving image that took place in the Byre Theatre, St Andrews, 23 – 25 June 2026.

The explosion in the port of Beirut on 4 August 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, was at first confusing when I saw the images and videos repeated online. I eventually learnt, through the media and colleagues, that it was an act of industrial scale negligence: abandoned unstable chemicals were left in a warehouse, caught alight and exploded, causing massive devastation. The first work of Maximum Tilt: a festival of artists’ moving image at the Byre Theatre in St Andrews was ​‘Congress of Idling Persons’ (2021) by Basyma Saad which brought the audience back in time to this significant event and the simultaneous events that led to major shifts in collective consciousness. That summer protests against the Lebanese Government re-ignited in Martyrs Square in Beirut, seemingly part of a second Arab Spring and concurrent with the global Black Lives Matter uprisings in response to the murder of George Floyd in the USA on 25 May 2020. Saad’s film immediately asked the attendees to reflect on how some images of uprising are conflated with riot or unruliness, and how others are legitimised as a democratic process, depending on person, cause or place. The overlapping narratives of the film’s characters and witnesses evoked the contradictions, bias and injustices at play. The images played back in Saad’s film, were geographically distant from where we were gathered, but they repeat on phone screens, collapsing distances, to communicate the latest updates on social media and international news channels, straight into our hands and into our psyche. 2021 seems a long time ago now, since the genocide in Gaza and the ongoing targeting of Southern Lebanon and Beirut by the Israeli Government, has redefined how we see destruction and the rubble of people’s former lives.

Saad suggested in the description for this work: ​‘if four is a riot, it is also a congress,’ providing an expansive proposition to begin the festival and enabling the audience to imagine collectivity in more dispersed ways, where individuals coordinate acts of protest and defiance, beyond the mass gathering typically found in an urban centre. The programme was conceived for LUX Scotland by the artist filmmakers Anne-Marie Copestake and Andrew Black to draw attention to the ways that filmmakers, as creators, documenters and disseminators, equip themselves with responsibility and agency, to tell stories in the moving images they produce.

Maximum Tilt was LUX Scotland’s third and largest event in St Andrews, a development of the partnership with the Film Studies department from the University, especially with Dr Philippa Lovatt (1). This angling toward film and cinema, widened the critical perspectives brought to the event further than I had experienced at smaller artists’ moving image screenings. The affluent town of St Andrews, renowned internationally for its golfing tradition and University, was a welcoming place for visiting festival attendees given its public transport links, accessible Byre Theatre, University accommodation and sandy beaches (2). The Fife rural coast is picturesque in its natural and built heritage, yet it is also militarised, industrialised and continues to benefit from the profits of its imperial past. This is where the programme took my mind, given that the programme encouraged critical questioning of place and place-making (3).

LUX Scotland cited the long running Flaherty Seminar, where people gather to watch non-fiction films, as a touchstone in Maximum Tilt’s development (4). Film-maker William Greaves asserted the value of this space when he said in 1991: ​“the Flaherty Seminar has got to be the toughest, most valuable, most stimulating arena in which a filmmaker can present his or her work.” My mind conjured up Greaves’ ​‘Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One’ (1968) and distinct memories of the scene where a group of people in New York, occupied a room, not an institution and talked over each other, disagreeing, lying down, standing up, relaxed, awkward, drinking and leaving. Maximum Tilt was not intended to be like the Flaherty, nor like ​‘Symbiopsychotaxiplasm’, yet it tangibly maintained the belief in the productivity of critical discussion through the programme support structures and ample time for discussion.

Six screening sessions, three shared meals, and four group discussions were spread over three days, featuring seventeen moving image works by artists, filmmakers, animators, activists and broadcasters. These hosting decisions mitigated the physical and cognitive toll required to commit to the darkened Byre Theatre for the duration – a challenge often discussed in relation to film festivals but, in my experience, rarely taken into consideration.

Reflecting on the programme as a whole, I’ve identified three thematic points through which to draw on some of the moving image works – most of the works speak to each of these ideas, and many more, but these were the ones I felt most affinity with:

storytelling of place

industrialised and militarised landscapes

campaigns of solidarity

Part of the opening session, Prantik Basu’s 2017 film ​‘Sakhisona’ was shot in black and white and used the light and silhouette of dusk’s fall into night to trace stories from folk songs onto the Indian landscape. Scenes of excavated stone figurines indicated how symbols from the songs appeared in 6^th century excavated carvings, such as the hunt of a rhino, so as to assert legitimacy to the songs. Basu’s sumptuous cinematography drew attention to the aesthetics of storytelling, adding drama, mystery and stylistic beauty, which felt like a conscious effort to reflect the malleable quality of the folk songs and their ability to evoke new meanings in each retelling. I loved how in one scene, Basu used the camera to trace the undulating contours of the landscape, and later used the same tracking shot to contour two sleeping actors’ bodies, creating a continuum between the characters in the folksongs and the mound itself.

Susan Hughes’ moving image work ​‘Ultraviolet’ pointed to the make-believe created through fairytales by creating a surprising parallel of two places connected through labour: In the late 1980s and early 90s people from Teelin in Donegal’s Gaeltacht had travelled to work on the construction of Disneyland Paris. Hughes imaginatively created aesthetic parallels through the colour choices and natural phenomenon, for example, the artificial construction of rocks at Disneyland in contrast to the cliff rock faces of Gaeltacht, formed over thousands of years. Cynically, however, those rocks are heavy, and Disney’s are lighter and more pragmatic for the ​“enchanted kingdom” of globalised Hollywood fairytales. ​‘Ultraviolet’ formed part of another thematic concern in the programme around tourism, in storytelling as well as its necessity for income generation in small places, also seen in Finlay J MacDonald’s 1973 BBC documentary ​‘A Future for the Past, (Look Stranger)’ which charted the importance of self-narration and cultural preservation on the Isle of Skye.

Unlike other works in the programme which focused on stories told publicly, Amal Al-Nakhala’s ​‘Limitless’ (2024) created a complex interior world of the hushed narrator’s subjective experience of living in Gaza, Palestine. The animation layered feelings of not recognising oneself, unknowing, confusion, shame and hate, accompanied by drawings symbolising how these emotions manifested as images in the psyche— for example domestic cooking knives, pots and chopping boards are imagined as part of bodily mutilation. The short piece took the audience into what felt like a private world that hinted to the unimaginable and perilous experiences of living each day in Gaza.

There was a conscious effort in the programme to include works that spoke to urban and rural settings, and how moving-image is used to disrupt narratives of rural places as simply picturesque or uninhabited by people. Seamus Harahan’s 2006 film ​‘Samurai’, shot in shaky footage from a train window, captured the arbitrary surface interactions many people have with the rural landscape: skirting quickly along a window surface, blurs of greenery, fields and woodland, interspersed with buildings, yards or factories – one looks like a nuclear power station, another a military site. The dubstep track, ​‘9 Samurai’ by Code 9 dominates this ordinary experience, with the repeated lyric ​“a stone will be thrown at the state, and a stone will be thrown at the churches” as if heard on headphones, taking the audience into Harahan’s critical, agitated inner world that feels all too familiar. There are hidden, coded elements to the work, specific to the place, that flit past. Shown alongside Harahan’s ​‘Free as a Bird’ (2006) which focused on Divis Tower in Belfast, a symbol of resistance to British rule, ​‘Samurai’s journey is loaded yet quotidian, taken from Belfast to Dublin, across the border between the states of Ireland.’ (5)

Where Harahan used his handheld camera to probe fleeting interactions with landscape, Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah’s film ​‘And still it remains’ (2023) took the audience into a slow interaction with the Hoggar Mountains in the Southern Sahara (Algeria), home to the Escamaran community of Black Algerians. Protracted panning shots of oranges and ochres in the rocks and dust of the landscape were contrasted with scenes of the scarce water and ensuing green spaces. We saw the material, human-created heritage of the place in stone carvings from around 6000 – 7000 BC, portraying an earlier time before the droughts, when the land was lush and green with plants, crops and livestock. As the film developed, we learnt about the atomic bomb tests conducted by the French state between 1961 – 66, the people who died immediately and those who died eventually due to radiation poisoning. We heard how during the French colonial occupation, the camera captured the landscape, the flora and fauna, and the people (6). The film dwells on the slow impact of nuclear testing on a landscape, its deep-time effects, and the violences that France inflicted on the land and the people living there, with their cameras and their weapons. Faceless voices that narrate the film counter the French colonial narratives: ​“they knew everything and we knew nothing.” The film concludes with the question of one of the storytellers: ​“So what can you say about these things?” A self-conscious question, as well as a provocation to the film’s creators, and its audiences.

An apparent contrast came in Peter Hall’s ​‘Akenfield’ (1974) – the funny, self-consciously nostalgic feature that engaged with tropes of Britishness associated with rural England. The semi-improvised film was constructed around intergenerational expectation, narrated by a grandfather, father and son named ​‘Tom’ (all performed by one actor) who lived in the Akenfield farming community. It told a trans-temporal story spanning the First and Second World Wars as well as the industrialisation of Britain’s farms, creating a picture of how external socio-political contexts shift local attitudes and ways of living. Centring on moments of congregation, around kitchen tables, funerals, farm labour, classrooms, travel, the film explored traditions of the town and was buoyed up with lively choral scenes. Copestake and Black’s inclusion of this film suggests an acknowledgment of the complex way that military narratives and militarism are held in rural histories of place through stories, intergenerational trauma, memorials and mass graveyards. It reminded me also that widespread anti-war movements in 20^th century Britain often stemmed from the generational trauma of those massive events of war. The film was consciously bound to the closed perspectives of the people in the film and therefore it felt like the concerns of the local place superseded those of any other.

Where Saad’s ​‘Congress of Idling Persons’ spoke to contemporary global solidarity campaigns of today, several films in the programme looked back to mass solidarity campaigns of the 20^th century in Scotland, and how these campaigns spread beyond the Scottish context. The earliest work was Helen Biggar’s silent film ​‘Challenge to Fascism: Glasgow’s May Day’ (1938) which charted the preparations and events of the annual march from where it assembled on George Square to its destination at Glasgow Green, bringing together the left-affiliated and working-class groups of the city (7). Biggar’s film emphasised the organisational work of making the event and therefore deterring media depictions of protest as unruly and disordered. It also focused on the creativity involved, in the float making, banner painting and performances of the numerous agitprop theatre groups. It was particularly charged with the anti-fascist politics of 1938, in response to then-Prime Minister Chamberlain and his government’s appeasing behaviour toward Hitler, who had just invaded Austria. Discussing the film as a group in one of the carefully constructed break out discussions brought up contradictory responses, a bit like the political incentives visible in the May Day march. In the film I had seen activist tools, alliance and inspiration in a work created by an anti-fascist progressive woman, asserting her political presence when society didn’t value her voice, while others had seen nostalgia and male dominated protest scenes. The programmers, Black and Copestake stated in their introductory text that they sought ​“to trouble a nostalgic view of the past”. They were successful in this ambition — in the diverging, ambivalent responses of the audience, held in the same room (8).

Therefore, what is the purpose in watching historic artists’ films showing protest and social history? For me, it asserts a legacy of artists’ direct involvement in solidarity movements and the ways filmmakers have used their medium to create cultural objects from campaigns in proximity to them. Sheffield Film Co-op’s film ​‘Bringing it all back home’ (1987) connected local labour campaigns across borders by exploring the industrial restructuring of global companies: The means of production that are spread across multiple nations, labour laws, political contexts and factories, abstracting the ​‘capital’ from the labour and ultimately weakening workers rights. Focusing on women-led campaigns for labour rights globally, the film drew together campaigns and geographies, reconstructing the contours of capitalism’s abstraction across land and sea borders and highlighting the common struggles of monotonous, gendered work and low pay, as well as its disproportionate effect on those marginalised because of ethnicity, class or visa status. ​‘Bringing it all back home’ is now nearly 40 years old and numerous global events and technological shifts have passed with it, yet the work still speaks to the way that new technology can enhance global solidarity.

‘Permanent Trespass’ (2026) by Basyma Saad and Sanja Grozdanić concluded the festival and brought the audience back into the expediency and overwhelm of contemporary online videos, headlines and news production. Large portions of the film followed the two ​‘eulogists’ – narrators speaking in retrospect of historical events post 1941 (a period dominated by the USA) – sitting in tableaux around a Western heritage house, where objects were being taken away for auction. The film’s description posed the question ​“Who or what is being mourned” – which framed the major wars, uprisings and injustices, through the people as well as the material objects and heritage of each place. Leading to ask, whose heritage is valued, collected and conserved and whose is lost? What do cultural objects and stories from the past tell us about those that have no record?

These questions, and many others, arose in the break outs, where participants could help each other figure out how a work was shot, edited, constructed; which details could expand narrative intention; the contextual layers of works through cultural and historical specificity; and the diversity of interpretation that each of us had. The formal discussions where we all contributed felt awkward at points, but we’d all committed our time to sit with the discomfort of giving a response honestly, even if we’d missed an illuminating detail, and acknowledging the contrasting interpretations that others had of the same material. The space created was at once vulnerable and incredibly productive to thinking about intention, and reception of a moving-image work or a programme.

In drawing together this programme, Black and Copestake provoked the audience to consider how moving image works hold multiple, contradictory narratives of a place. Through their selection they covered a long arc of film production over the 20^th and 21^st century, provoking contemplation on how films become relics of culture, holding stories of lives and actions. As seen through the songs of ​‘Sakhisona’, folk stories continue to be active and hold meaning for the people in the places they were created and beyond. When viewed in correlation with many other local stories, they form a mass… perhaps, a ​‘congress’. The artist programmers foregrounded the agency of filmmakers, as producers of visual culture and future heritage: ​‘objects’ that shape, and intervene in, the communication of the places and times live/​d within. In concluding with ​‘Permanent Trespass’, there was an acknowledgment of the silences, as opacities and violences, but also as spaces of imagination, for the artists, film-makers and writers attending to critically consider, and leap off from.

*The title of this piece is a quote from Basyma Saad on her film ​‘Congress of Idling Persons’ (2021).

(1) After ​‘Immaterial Worlds’ at Sands International Film Festival in 2023 and the Flaherty Gathering screening in 2025.

(2) Unusually, the town of St Andrews has maintained a thriving high street and steady tourism, which explains its hospitality, yet it is now mostly unaffordable to live in for people working or studying in the region.

(3) Journeying by bus from Dundee across rural Fife, I went past enormous farms lined with polytunnels of soft fruit as well as fields filled with cabbages, carrots and peas; I looked out to Leuchars, the operational British Army Base in use by the Forces since 1920 but let my mind wander to the beaches and forests along the Fife coastline. Two fighter jets flew overhead – side by side – a reminder that the east coast bases have been undertaking increased activity ever since 2022 and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

(4) LUX Scotland staff attended the 70^th annual Flaherty Seminar in New York in June 2025 and hosted a series of Flaherty Gatherings that autumn at The Hunterian, Glasgow, The Cooper Gallery in Dundee and at St Andrews University.

(5) See Aaron Kelly, LUX New Artist Focus: Aaron Kelly on Seamus Harahan ​‘World is Suddener: Films of the Fleeting and the Art of Seamus Harahan’, 11 August 2022, accessed 2 September 2026.

(6) In relation to this point on agency of the person photographed or filmed it is worth reading Ariella Azoulay, ​‘The Civil Contract of Photography’, 2008 in relation to consent and agency in the history of photography.

(7) Shona Main and Jenny Brownrigg created this brilliant piece of writing for MAP in 2016.

(8) Shortly before attending I’d been to a talk by the artist Naeem Mohaiemen about his experience navigating archives of uprisings and he had used the term ambivalence, to refer to the contradictory happenings we witness in historic materials and the opposing positions of difference and commonality that can be held in an archive.

Editorial feedback on this piece was given by David Upton, Public Programme Manager at LUX Scotland and Alison Scott, artist and co-editor of PAMphlet.