Third Year of the Experimental Film Festival in South West UK
Elevation Film Festival is a celebration of artistic, experimental and expanded cinema, championing filmmakers and moving-image artists from the South West, across the UK and internationally.
Organised by Elevation Arts CIC, the festival has received Arts Council support, enabling it to grow as a platform for bold, innovative and independent creative voices. Its first two editions were hosted at Maker Heights in Cornwall, with the support of Patchwork Studios, bringing together screenings, installations, filmmaker talks and workshops in a unique coastal setting.
Now entering its third year, the festival is expanding into Plymouth through a partnership with Real Ideas, building on its success while continuing to foster connection, creativity and the exchange of new ideas within the film and arts community.
Schedule
Sat 5th Oct
Screenings: international short films
at Devonport Guildhall
10:00 - 11:15
12:00 - 13:15
14:15 - 15:30
16:00 - 17:15
Evening events
at Market Hall
17:30 - 18:00
18:00 - 18:45
19:15 - 19:30
19:30 - 20:00
20:00 - 21:00
Sun 6th Oct
Screenings: international short films
at Devonport Guildhall
10:00 - 11:15
11:45 - 13:00
14:00 - 15:30
16:00 - 17:15
Evening events
at Market Hall
17:30 - 18:00
18:00 - 18:45
19:00 - 19:15
19:30 - 20:15
20:00 - 21:00
Saturday 5th October
Out of Place
LOCATION: Devonport Guildhall
10:00 - 11:15 | 57min plus Q&A
International short films
These films are acts of taking flight, departures and arrivals. A sense of place is at their centre, where the familiar might take on a sinister, threatening quality, or filmmakers find themselves far away, feeling perfectly at home. From the museum to the motorway, they interrogate how the architecture around us might inform our sense of ourselves and our place in the world.
Films by:
Andrea Marquez | Vasilios Papaioannu | Gillian Waldo, Sam Taffel | Faye Shu | Eric Daniel Butler | Jonathan Kan | Biviana Chauchi | Eislow Johnson
This is How I Want to Remember You
LOCATION: Devonport Guildhall
12:00 - 13:15 | 59min plus Q&A
International short films
What does it mean to archive the personal, and how do we embody the memories of others? Grounded in the materiality of the image, these films are tender and tactile explorations of grief and family history, studying our complex relationships to mothers and motherlands, fathers and fatherlands.
Films by:
Jawad Jabado | Kamila Kuc | Lin Li | Hamish Halley | Grau Del Grau | Mahda Purmehdi | Harper Stone
Invitations for the Untutored Eye
LOCATION: Devonport Guildhall
14:15 - 15:30 | 56min plus Q&A
International short films
A programme of works that remind us of the essence of experimental film as an adventure in perception. The acts of seeing, looking, watching are explored in their relationship to the eye of the camera. What does the medium of film allow us to see that we wouldn’t otherwise? Things you can’t un-see. If you listen carefully, can you hear the act of seeing? Touch the vision when it disappears with the torn-out eyeball, taste the watching with visceral disgust. These sensorially intense films question assumptions of what it’s like to see, exploring the potential of the audiovisual medium to appeal to the full human sensorium. Can a film make your throat hurt or the top of your head tingle?
Films by:
Cassandra Lesage Fongué | Ryan Marino | Will VanKoughnett | Ellery Bryan | Natalie Peracchio | Sofia Tudela | Karel Doing
The Word for World is Forest
LOCATION: Devonport Guildhall
16:00 - 17:15 | 65min plus Q&A
International short films
In a world shaped by wildfires and heatwaves, what might plants have to say about sound and vision, language and wordlessness? How can our flora friends offer up rhizomatic selves, decentralized intelligences, and alternative ways of looking? Lichen development, onion science fiction, and lessons on gender from the Ginkgo tree converge in this programme which explores our communion with the botanical world.
Films by:
Janelle VanderKelen | Xin Shen | Philip Hoffman | Takahiro Suzuki | Tessa Garland | Hogan Seidel & Gabby Follett | Josh Weissbach
Screenings &
Live Performances
LOCATION: Market Hall
360 Immersive Dome
18:00 - 18:45
Nuckelavee
Max Breakenridge
Screening + Q&A
Nuckelavee is an immersive image and sound installation on the vast and mysterious power of the ocean. Reintegrating Orcadian environmental mythology with our current climate, the work embodies the sea with an enveloping cosmic force as viewers are placed in the centre of an ocean storm.
Max Breakenridge is a filmmaker and artist based in Glasgow. His work is concerned with myth, sensory perception, mysticism and the search for an ecstatic cosmic present. Alongside moving image work, he is part of the collective P!NK M!NCE, combining sound, performance, moving image and music.
19:30 - 20:00
Kwiatostany
Seaing/Hereing
Live Audiovisual Performance
Kwiatostany (eng: Inflorescences) is an expanded cinema performance by experimental film/sound duo Seaing/Hereing. The work is an explorative investigation of approaches to capturing images and sounds of flowers, attempting to translate the phenomenological aspects of embodied encounters into an expanded audiovisual performance. In Kwiatostany, flowers are filmed through intuitive somatic camera moving through space in exploration of haptic visuality methods from an autistic point of view. Field recordings are gathered on the same sites as the flowers and guided by Deep Listening methods. The soundscape is then created from synthesisers build from a combination of the field recordings with electrical impulses generated by the flowers.
Seaing/Hereing (Patrycja Loranc & Sam Johnson) is an experimental film/sound art duo. The themes of our work are driven by our neurodivergent experience of heightened and altered visual and audio perception. Through psychedelic and flicker film, surrealist poetry, and modified field recordings, we explore sensory connections to a sense of home among the South West landscapes and seascapes, rediscovering neurodivergent relationships to nature, objects, and spaces.
20:00 - 21:00
Networking & Drinks
at Market Hall
Sunday 6th October
Real Body/
Dream Body
LOCATION: Devonport Guildhall
10:00 - 11:15 | 60min plus Q&A
International short films
The mirror neurons activate the motor areas in our brains when we watch someone perform an action, as if we were doing the same. As embodied spectators, incarnate beings, what do we sense when we watch other bodies on screen? These films are connected by movement, sensorial embodiment, both strength and fragility of bodies. How do we connect with the world and each other through our physical form?
Films by:
Lili Süper | Charlie Jimenez | Gabi Rudin | Rhiana Bonterre | Samuel Karow | Rebecca Barten
Frames of Reverence
LOCATION: Devonport Guildhall
11:45 - 13:00 | 64min plus Q&A
International short films
The choice to point a camera at a subject is an act of radical attention and devotion, but in each frame something is excluded, left out, abandoned. These films gesture to the art of filmmaking, from love letters to seminal auteurs, through to structuralist experiments and DIY processes. Through experiments in content and form, we come to understand how filmmaking can be an act of love, play or even violence.
Films by:
Caroline Johnson | Eduardo Gutierrez Carrera | Laura Kraning | Thomas Renoldner | Simon Payne | Kirk Tougas | Diane Nerwen
Weird Futures
LOCATION: Devonport Guildhall
14:00 - 15:30 | 56min plus Q&A
International short films
This programme collates visions for the future, imaginings, speculations, utopias and divinations. How might film become a tool for fostering hope, building resilience, planning revenge, organising for connection? Passing through portals of transition and stages of transformation, the films propose change as an interconnected ecology of processes without a preconceived form, filled with possibility. Hatching into the weird and wonderful unknown.
Films by:
Maite Alonso & Unai Ruiz | Eislow Johnson & Kate In | Chloé Larrère | J Triangular | Işıl Karataş | Jean-François Reverdy
Devon & Cornwall
LOCATION: Devonport Guildhall
16:00 - 17:15 | 62min plus Q&A
Showcasing work in any genre by filmmakers based in Devon & Cornwall.
Films by:
anna best | Tom Churchill | janine rook | Pete Jerrett | Kayla Parker & Stuart Moore | Matilda Butler | Imperfect Cinema & University of Plymouth student cohort
Screenings &
Live Performances
LOCATION: Market Hall
360 Immersive Dome
18:00 - 18:45
Juxt
Zero Wizard
Live Performance + Q&A
Juxt is a project exploring nature vs noise. It is a live sound mixing project combining a harsh visceral noise with an ambient natural soundscape. For the performance at Elevation Film Festival, it will have an accompanying visual element screened in the dome.
Jack Hoare is a Filmmaker and Sound Artist based in Plymouth, releasing art under the name Zero Wizard, who is fascinated by the definition of noise. Manipulating the idea of unwanted sounds by either pairing them with a visual representation or performing them standalone. Jack's work is created using a combination of guitar pedals, various instruments, sample recordings, and contact microphones.
19:30 - 20:15
To Die Into a Bird
Anna Kushnerova
Screening + Q&A
Anna Kushnerova is a filmmaker, performance artist, and founder of Human Clay CIC, a Devon based practice led arts organisation working across film, performance, ecology, and community participation. Her films unfold as ritual ecological fairy tales where documentary, mythology, movement, and sculptural practice converge. Drawing on Butoh, eco-somatic practice, and site responsive research, she creates immersive cinematic worlds inhabited by more than human beings, ancestral memory, and living landscapes. Working with performers, natural materials, and experimental sound, her films invite audiences into dreamlike encounters where bodies, environments, and myth continually transform one another. Through Human Clay, Kushnerova develops films, performances, workshops, and participatory projects that cultivate new relationships between people and the living world, bringing artists, ecologists, communities, and local landscapes into creative dialogue.
To Die Into a Bird is a ritual ecological fairy tale unfolding within the ancient landscapes of Dartmoor. Entering the dreamlike time after death, the film follows spectral guardians of the afterworlds, river phantoms, chimeric beings, and vegetal custodians as they accompany the deceased across the thresholds between worlds. Human form gradually metamorphoses into animal, plant, and fungal life, while a bird opera of calls, songs, and unseen voices echoes its passage across the thresholds between worlds. The film reimagines death as a passage into the living cosmos, where decomposition is a sanctuary, a porous zone of shapelessness, renewal and kinship.
20:15 - 21:00
Networking & Drinks
at Market Hall
Installations
Saturday 4th October
& Sunday 5th October
LOCATION: Market Hall - Main Hall
17:30 - 18:00
Join us for a Q&A
with Shaun Clark!
Saturday 4th October
19:15 - 19:30
Scratching the Surface
films by Shaun Clark
This collection of artist films by Shaun Clark, investigate what lies beneath the surface of places, bodies, homes and images. Shot on Standard 8mm, Hi8, and digital formats, the works explore community, emotions, spaces and movement, revealing hidden patterns and unexpected connections under the surface. The work moves between drawn animation, pixilation and mixed media. Supported with scores
written by acclaimed artists Robert Stillman, Chris White, Hutch Demoulipied, and Angela Alhucema. Together, these works invite viewers o look beyond appearances and into the depths that shape experience.
Born in Beverley, United Kingdom, Shaun Clark has worked as an independent filmmaker and animator since 2005, producing more than 20 short films. His films have screened in over 500 festivals. His work has earned BAFTA nominations and won prestigious awards at festivals such as Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival,
the London Short Film Festival, the Imagine Film Festival, and the British Animation Awards. Retrospective screenings of his work have been held in Greece and
South Korea. He has created films for institutions, including the BBC, Discovery Times USA, and Arts Council England. With a diverse portfolio ranging from narrative-driven pieces to artist films, horror, comedy, and children’s cinema, surrealism and dark humour runs through much of his work, often as a tool for confronting deeper truths. Currently based in London, Shaun continues to work as a filmmaker, committed to creating independent film.
Join us for a costume procession on the stairway in the Main Hall!
Sunday 5th October
19:00 - 19:15
On Parade
Charlotte Henry-Stumpe
Charlotte Henry-Stumpe draws together found materials and scrapstore offerings to create costumes and art objects which she documents through digital and analogue processes to piece together experimental stop-motion short films.
Along with the lens of a camera, clothing and scraps become a secondary form of recording and this process helps to translate her experience of place. The materials she recovers inform the visual narrative and specific context of the film, often touching upon the political backdrop of small communities.
Henry-Stumpe mythologises prevalent symbols, such as high-vis workwear, as items of transformation and subversion. She challenges how costume, clothing and waste are used as tools of municipal control and presents how this systemic infrastructure can be overcome. Part of this process involves the invitation of activation-the wearing- of the costumes. In her film ‘On Parade’ she retraces a journey, continually returning to the places that have informed the costumes to explore how our scraps could be re-made, re-worn or tell new stories and hopes any new personal interpretations can be passed on as local history or future mythology.
LIVE MIME/
DUMB HIPPY
Sam Machell
LIVE MIME/DUMB HIPPY is a piece of silent absurd theatre staged with and for an automated non-human system. The subject clown exists in a state of routine and confinement, completing simple data collection tasks and sometimes being rewarded with an orange to eat. Despite the hopelessness of his situation, he finds ways of making fun and expressing his discontent, experimenting with the props and staging symbolic protests for the cameras he knows are watching. The software that runs the work continually reconfigures the order of scenes and shots according to an authored structure. The resulting effect is one of liveness, where each viewer encounter is emergent within the parameters of a script; and one in which the subject is being organised, in and out of the diegesis, by a computer.
Sam Machell is an artist, writer and game developer. His multi-disciplinary practice networks drawings, texts, performances and videos to conjure absurd fictions. He is interested in knotty, complex ecologies and systems of power; in the emotional and bodily experiences of the frail consciousnesses caught within them. Sam is a studio holder at KARST.
