Sketches of Brunei + Birdsong

Evocative medium-length films that explore forgotten memories, space and place.

Pieced together using footage from the 70s and 80s, both of these evocative medium-length films explore forgotten memories, and through different approaches manage to capture a true sense of time and place.

In Ian Nesbitt’s Sketches of Brunei c.1978, he re-edits his parents’ cinefilm, shot whilst they were living in Brunei, and multidisciplinary artist George Rogers breathes new life into the footage with an Eastern-music-inspired electronic score.

Taking the 1986 Chernobyl disaster as her subject Clara Casian’s lyrical and revealing film Birdsong: Stories from Pripyat mixes found and previously unseen archival material with contemporary footage. The handcrafted approach, weaving together stories and personal accounts set it aside from traditional documentary filmmaking. Robin Richards’s (Dutch Uncles) live score based on first hand testimonies of Pripyat residents, adds further poignancy.