Losing one’s way in a forest, on a mountain, by the sea, in a city…

Metaphors for the impossibility of experience, and the irretrievability of memory.

Stories by Pierre Deruisseau, Donya Feki, Murielle Magellan, Olivier Magis, Karim Olabi, Annick Vellut, Olivier Vuylsteke, and Claudine Welter.

Recorded and translated into images by Peter Snowdon.

Sounds composed by Peter Snowdon and Olivier Touche.

Creative disorientation: Bruno Tracq.

Assistant dialogue editor: Karolina Majewska.

Digitisation of rushes: Cedric Delaunoy/Le Labo.

Super 8/DV, 22 mns, AJC!

Commissioned as part of the AJC!’s 2009 call for experimental Super 8 film projects.

Released under a Creative Commons 3.0 BY-NC-SA licence.

Avant-premiere: Cinema Nova, Brussels, 24 April 2010.

This film was made possible by the Creative Commons spirit, as embodied in particular by freesound.org, ccmixter, the Internet Archive and Magnatune.

View full music and field recording credits (coming soon).

Consult the original proposal (in French).

But first we had to get to Zbabde.

Two young filmmakers are trying to visit a village near Jenin in the West Bank. But when they reach the Hamra checkpoint in the Jordan valley, the Israeli army refuses to let them pass.

The advice of a young soldier who is nostalgic for the English countryside, and a chance meeting with three strangers wearing yellow fluorescent jackets, will get them back on the path. But the path to where?

A documentary film by Peter Snowdon, starring Rima Essa, Nizzar and friends. Release is scheduled for mid-2010.

16 minutes, DV, 4:3, mono.

View the trailer.

Visit website.

Buy the limited edition DVD.

Boy loses washing machine.

Boy gets (new) washing machine.

Starring Scali Delpeyrat, with James Harris

and the voice of Ben Pearson

And featuring both the music and the physical presence of Them Amazing Babies

Hard on the heels of shooting Bewick’s Mambo, I got the chance to make a Digital Short as part of the UK Film Council/NFM Stingers scheme. In my mind the script was like a cross between the Ozu of Ohayo and the Straubs of Sicilia! A film with a deadpan humour, and a low-key approach to obstinacy and obsession.

However, things didn’t quite work out that way. The locations were the wrong ’shape’, the natural light was intent on melodrama, and Scali was bent on Dostoevsky. And filmmaking is the art of letting the world surprise you, and rejoicing in the ruins of your plans.

We shot on HD with an EX-1, and for the first time, too, I had could get the actors to do the scene 50 times and capture all of that process. So we went wild. We didn’t just cover the scenes, we explored every nook and crannie of them, pushing them to their limits. Some of the strongest stuff in the film wasn’t in the script at all. Maybe we shouldn’t have shot any of the script. Maybe, next time…

Scali and James were immaculate in the first scene – Raskolnikov in Wallsend. Virginie Surdej lit the interiors like the sun had never existed, and invented the extraordinary ‘fake’ crane shot at the end of the kitchen romance. Molly Barrett brought Vermeer to the bomb sites of Newcastle’s West End. Kate Eccles recruited half her family to dance on Embleton beach in the rain. Frankie Appleton used her connections to find us a band who had exactly the right song for the final scene already recorded — just one week before shooting. We liked Ben Pearson, the lead singer, so much, he came back to do the narration.

Everyone who was there on the last day deserves special praise for having worked through the cold and the rain to get the final steadycam shot in the can, and not having gone down with pneumonia afterwards. Their children will be proud of their genetic in heritance.

As for me, I’m particularly proud of the fact that when this film screened in one festival, the festival director made a special announcement that because of Rinse and Spin, the programme was rated 18, and that those of a sensitive disposition might like to leave the theatre temporarily when our film came on. Nice! I wonder if they give the same warning when they have a feature by Martin Scorsese?

2008, 9 minutes, HD, 16:9, stereo.

Watch an extract from the film here.

View photo gallery and full credits (coming soon).

View the screening history.

Starring Scali Delpeyrat, Lou Wenzel and James Harris

Best short fiction on an ecological theme, Malescorto International Short Film Festival, Italy, 2009

Best short film, CinemaJAZZ section, Kansas City Film Festival, 2010

Breather won the first-ever NFM Sound and Vision award in 2007, and the prize was £3000 for me and Paul to make another film together.

Paul had originally conceived this tune as a Ballardian fantasy about traffic wardens and vegetation running riot in the metropolis, and the original mix had plenty of car horns in it. But whether it was lack of imagination on my part, or just an aversion to shooting a film outside in the first four months of the year, the story line was soon transposed into a more indoor environment – the wonderful Regency library of the Lit and Phil, where I used to seek refuge on long winter nights when I was in the sixth form.

Again, chance encounters played a great role in making one man’s mad ideas seem, if not plausible, than at least possible. Meg Amsden had spent many years doing puppet shows for the Norfolk Broads authority, and was the only person in the country who seemed to have been stockpiling animal figures against the day a mad filmmaker would come and knock on her door. Kay Eason and her wonderful team at the library, rather than throwing up their hands in despair at the thought of introducing live animals into the precinct, put me in contact with Ray Lowden, the last man who had flown a snowy owl around the reading room. Two new-born lambs arrived from the Bainbridges of Colliewobbles, who I’d never met before, only to turn out to have been named after my sister and her ex-husband.

In the end, the biggest problem wasn’t the animals, but the filmmakers who kept disturbing the traditional filing system (aka ‘tidying up’) on which the Lit and Phil’s members have come to rely. Fortunately, we got everything done in only four nights, over a long (sometimes, apparently endless) weekend.

Adam flew back from Budapest to do some more serious work. Dave Gibson won the Mark Pinder memorial prize for agreeing to come for two hours to record a little dialogue and staying till dawn to help with the smoke machine.  Mark Pinder helped fake the Bewick’s books we ‘destroyed’ (and which are now worth a fortune on Ebay). Chris Cole moved up the evolutionary ladder, from stones to trees.

Meg might have lived at the other end of the country, but it was she who found us Molly Barrett, the only woman in Newcastle who knew how to make a tropical forest out of a couple of old coat hangers and some tie-died netting. I met James Harris at the Depict! screenings in Bristol, where we were both in competition (he should have won), and he has been inseparable from my imagination ever since. Kate Eccles made it impossible for me ever to look at James Harris in the same way again. Lou Wenzel was demure when it mattered, and then took enormous delight in playing the shadow of the bear that devoured Scali. Paul Kemp battled with the minijib, and almost won. Sam Masud instilled order without anyone even noticing he was doing it. And a huge crowd of runners from more than one regional university made the atmosphere just that little bit more like a Hollywood film set.

Like Breather, Bewick’s seems to exert a strange fascination over all our friends’ children, who will spend hours watching it over and over again. Surely the world is just crying out for a feature-length musical with a Latin jazz sound track, grown men wearing bear suits, full-frontal nudity, and plenty of live small animal action? Isn’t it?…

2008, 9 minutes, Super 16/Digibeta, 1:185, Dolby SR.

View the opening of the film here.

To see Mark’s behind-the-scenes photo gallery, click here.

View list of screenings and full credits.

Soznak

Adam Fillenz

Nutmeg Puppet Theatre

Keilder Water Birds of Prey Centre

Colliewobbles

Lit and Phil

Northern Film and Media

Thomas Bewick

To be projected silent, or as a visual theme for musical improvisation.

2007, 5 minutes, Super8/DV, 4:3, silent.

My first outing with my newly acquired Canon 1014e was inspired more by Jonas Mekas’ Lost lost lost – in particular, by the footage of Mekas filming towards the end – than by the work of Brakhage, which I only got to know well a few years later.

I spent a long time trying to edit this footage to music – first, to the John Coltrane track which I had accidentally recorded while doing the telecine in the comfort of my living room off a small Elmo ground glass viewer, and later to a track by Habib Koite. But neither of these really worked.

One evening, while under the influence of Brakhage (the Re:VOIR VHS of hand-painted films) I got the rushes out again, and tried treating the keyboard of my edit PC (the much-regretted FAST Purple…) like a visual synthesiser clavier on which I could improvise whatever music I liked.

Arnold Schoenberg, Henry Threadgill, même combat. Especially with the volume turned right down.

Stan Brakhage

Kodachrome 40 (RIP).

View the entire film on dérives.tv.

Screening history

Openings, Film Love #53, Eyedrum, Atlanta, GA, USA (live soundtrack by Roger Ruzow and the Atlanta Fourth Ward Improvisational Ensemble), 9 December 2007.

Carte blanche à Dérives, Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg, France, 6 February 2008.

Images contre nature, Marseille, France, 3 and 5 July 2008.

Antimatter Underground Film Festival, Victoria, BC, 20 September 2008.

Oculi, Bottega Gallery, Wilmington, NC, 20 September 2008.

Iowa City Experimental Film Fest, 11 October 2008.

Featuring Scali Delpeyrat as The Breather

Winner, Northern Film and Media Sound and Vision Award, 2007

Shortlisted, Depict! 07

Breather was my first attempt at directing fiction. It was inspired by memories of Buster Keaton, and of my mispent youth in the Parisian right-bank sitting in cafés with Scali and sharing endless absurd jokes and surreal suppositions. The film was shot on Ben Sampay’s lovingly cared-for Aaton by Adam Fillenz, who had shot two stunning short films for my friend Dani Beres. Adam and I first met in Newcastle train station two days before we started work. He slept on a superior camp bed in our sun room, and showed no signs of being surprised by anything the English did.

Becky Sutton appeared from nowhere a month before the shoot and made all the stuff that was broken work. (If you have the chance to employ her, don’t think twice!). Frankie Appleton came along to paint fences, and it was only later I discovered she was an original and talented animator, and completely wasted on woodwork. Mark  Pinder established a habit of turning up for an hour and staying for two days, not only to take stills, but to advise, resolve, and encourage. And Chris Coles built the largest polystyrene stone in the world, which was later put out to grass somewhere in North Tynedale (the landowner wanted it to deter strangers from parking on one edge of his land).

The original inspiration came from Paul Miskin’s beautiful music, and the film was funded through Northern Film and Media’s Sight and Sound scheme to bring together north-east musicians and filmmakers.

Click here to view the film

To read the full credits, see here.

Northern Film and Media

Soznak

Adam Fillenz

A documentary film by Rima Essa and Peter Snowdon.

In 2003, I was contacted by engineer friends from Newcastle University who were working on a major project to provide the Palestinian Authority with up-to-date knowledge of the water resources that might be available to a future Palestinian state. They wanted to know if I would be interested to make a short film presenting the Palestinian position in the water debate with Israel.

I’d been looking for a valid way to visit Palestine since I had worked at Al-Ahram in Egypt, where the Palestinian struggle played a key role in defining the newspaper’s identity. I wanted to go and see for myself what lay behind the rhetoric. The proposal from Newcastle was the opportunity I was waiting for. I readily agreed to do the film, on one condition: I didn’t want to make a technical film driven by experts. Whatever story emerged from my research should be told in the words of ordinary Palestinians discussing their everyday lives.

In the end, I finished up making two films: an institutional presentation, for Newcastle University, about the project they were running, and another, quite different film, for the NGO House of Water and Environment, founded by the university’s lead researcher in the West Bank, Dr Amjad Aliewi.

This second film was a collaboration between myself and the Palestinian filmmaker Rima Essa, whom I had met briefly in Brussels before I traveled to Palestine. Rima had just graduated from film school in Jerusalem, and threw herself into the project body and soul. We spent four months wandering the West Bank together, following up leads and hunches from our engineering friends. It was a journey of discovery for both of us. Rima came from the Galilee and had spent very little time in the occupied territories. Her desire to understand the lives of the people we met went far deeper than journalistic curiosity or political commitment. It was as though arriving in the West Bank – where her family had no immediate connections – she was finally coming home.

Drying up Palestine is in many ways a fairly primitive piece of work, both technically, and in its rhetoric. And the final script was a somewhat uncomfortable compromise between our observational approach to filming, and our sponsors’ need for pedagogical concision and clarity. However, I believe the film has the virtues of its defects. It tells an important story clearly, and it allows the farmers and householders we met to do most of the talking. And the message it conveys is one that I still stand by. The water problems faced by the Palestinians have nothing to do with the climate, and everything to do with the occupation.

2007, 28 minutes, DV, 4:3, mono.

Watch the opening of the film.

View screening history and credits.

Visit website.

House of Water and Environment

Winner, Oblò Underground Short Film Festival 2007.

Honourable mention, Expressions of Nakhba 2008.

Night. A terrace on a hillside. Children’s voices.

A poem. A song.

A fragment of time, a moment out of time.

Ghostly figures, as if struggling to exist, even here, in their own land.

Experimental documentary, filmed in the West Bank, occupied Palestinian territories.

With Abdul-Latif, Tamara, Brahim and Arwa Khader, and Rima Essa.

English translations by Nabil Shawkat.

6 minutes, DV, 4:3, mono.

Watch an extract from the film here.

View list of screenings.

Read A Moreton Bay Vision.

Read Où sont les soldats? (in French)

Purchase the DVD edition as part of Dérives vol 2.

In September 2002, I attended the inaugural genespotting action organised in Belgium by the CAGE (Collectif d’Action GénEthique). I wasn’t sure what to expect — I had been present at Franc-Waret two years earlier when the CAGE had organised a study day culminating in the first ever Seeds Party in the country — the joyous disinfection of a Monsanto research station at Franc-Waret.

Expecting a lively time, I had purchased a Super 8 camera in advance over Ebay. If I was going to have equipment confiscated or damaged, I reasoned that it should be relatively inexpensive equipment.

In fact, the Genespotting series turned out to be quite a different proposition, even though the impetus to organise them had come from the approaching day of the trial over Franc-Waret. The aim was simply to open up a space for discussion in the eye of the storm — on the very sites that were being used to make, test or otherwise advance GM seeds, and with the people who were the ostensible ‘enemy’.

It turned out that the CAGE could not have chosen a better ‘enemy’ to begin with. The farmer whose land we processed to, Eric van Wajnsberg, had at first declined the invitation to meet and discuss his decision to plant a trial field of GM rapeseed for Bayer. But shortly after we arrived there, he turned up on his bicycle, and stayed for several hours, explaining in detail his life, his work, and his attitude to genetic engineering. By the end of the afternoon, you got the feeling he was really glad to have met a group of people who were so interested in what he was doing, and the choices he had to make, which were far from straightforward.

This excursion turned out to be the start of two adventures – the Genespotting campaign, which I continued to document over the next 12 months for the CAGE’s archives, and a friendship between myself and some others with Eric, whom we stayed in touch with, and returned to film, several times over the following years.

The film Ce qu’on a fait à Florennes was put together with the assistance of several of the people who had organised and taken part in the day’s action, and the soundtrack records their memories and thoughts. Pierre Deruisseau helped us choose the music. The technical and aesthetic responsibility for the editing lies with myself and Helen Holder, but the authorship of the film was collectively ascribed to Les Films en Compote, the filmmaking wing of the CAGE, and an untranslatable play on words.

15 minutes, DV/Super 8, 4:3, mono.

Interview about Genespotting with Sebastien Denys of the CAGE (in French).

ASEED call out for action (in English).

World premiere: Cinema Nova, Brussels, Belgium, February 2003.

Festivals: Camera des champs, Ville-sur-Yron, France, May 2004.

Les Conviviales de Nannay, France, August 2004.

Bobines sociales, Paris, January 2005.

Distribution: Indymedia European Newsreal 8

Used by ASEED Europe to launch their 2003 European Genespotting campaign.

Excerpts screened by ARTE Germany (Absolut).

He has lived and worked as teacher, publisher, bureaucrat, translator, poet, journalist, political activist, jazz pianist, and farm labourer in France, Egypt, India and Belgium.

He established Gourna Films in 2000 to explore his interest in the kind of lightweight independent documentary filmmaking that was being made possible by digital technologies. In the past five years, his work has diversified to include everything from homemade experimental films in Super 8, to fully-funded short fictions shot on HD with crews of up to 40 people.  His films have been shown across four continents at film festivals and political meetings, in art galleries and universities, in village cafes and under ancestral trees.

He is currently completing the Transmedia master-after-masters programme at Sint Lukas Hogeschool, Brussels, where he is researching the use of multi-screen video installation to represent ritual time and space.

His other website is Unoccupied territories.

Download a recent CV.

Blog/twitter/…

You can contact Peter by writing to: peter [at] redrice [dot] net.

Portrait (c) Dana Smillie

Peter Snowdon was born in Northumberland, in the north of England, in 1964. He has lived in France, Egypt and Belgium, where he has practiced a variety of trades, in particular journalism, and been either a close observer of, or direct participant in, a number of social and political struggles.
Since 2000, he has also been making films - documentaries, experimental videos, and short fiction.
He is currently completing an MFA in Transmedia at Sint Lukas Hogeschool, Brussels, where he is researching video installation and/as ritual.