Four Parts of a Folding Screen

Shot in Berlin, Four Parts of a Folding Screen is a feature-length work that explores the space between documentary and fiction. Under the Nazi's, a woman's husband is forced to leave. The house must be sold and possessions put into storage. A bureaucratic process thus begins, orchestrated by the state, to deprive the woman of her citizenship and to guarantee the legalised acquisition and auction of her family's belongings, raising money for the regime and funding the war. A voice, enigmatic and sometimes uncertain, foretells of, relates and recalls these routine injustices and their legacy. Part of the research element of this work explores, through the form of video as an indexical and essentially documentary medium, ways of articulating the apparent normality of the bureaucratic processes employed by the Nazi regime. The apparent reflexivity of the film acknowledges and questions the medium of video as an archiving process - making visible a comparison with the use, in the film itself, of archive material drawn from several sources, including Berlin archives and family documents. Such research has relevance in relation to continuing discussion of video and new media centred on the notion of film as a database (or archive) of images.

Four Parts of a Folding Screen (UK 2018, 83 mins) (Funding Arts Council of England) Screenings: International Film Festival Rotterdam (2018), IndieLisboa (2018), Jewish Film Festival Berlin and Brandenburg (2018), Crosskultur Berlin (2018), Cinema Flagey Brussels (programmed run of 9 screenings) (2019), Docpoint Helsinki (2019), Prelude screening to Essay Film Festival (Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, London University) / Outsiders-Insiders Festival London (2019), One World Romania (2019), Close-Up Film Centre London (2019), Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow (2020)