Open City Documentary Festival
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
24 April 2024
Sunless Haven had its world premiere as the opening night film at the Open City Documentary Festival 2024.
George Clark worked with historians Simeon Koole and Ben Mechen, sound artist Jol Thoms and performance artist Yarli Allison to imagine the experiences in, around and through the London Docklands at the turn of the 20th century. “Woven into the film are attempts to understand the docklands as a meeting place between different ecologies, enclosures and epochs, as a point of entanglement of the city and world. The film looks at ways to describe and embody these enmeshed histories from the legacy of police persecution of seaman boarding houses and Indian dockworkers known as lascars to the traces of early Chinatown in Limehouse and the experiences of London by Ayahs and Amahs, predominantly Chinese or Indian nannies brought back from the colonies and abandoned in the city after the voyage.” (George Clark)
The premiere of Sunless Haven (George Clark, 2024) will be accompanied with a selection of 35mm reels from Clark’s ongoing project Eyemo Rolls – an expanding constellation of over 200 films shot in camera since 2011 – and works by other artists. Evoking the concept of “Flowing Water Parallelisms” in Chinese poetry, this special screening curated by George Clark draws together works connected to ideas of water and liquid bodies as way to think about worlds within worlds at various border and transient zones.Followed by a conversation with George Clark, Simeon Koole and May Adadol Ingawanij.
Opening Night: Sunless Haven, Open City Documentary Film Festival
The programme featured the following works including new 35mm reels from the ongoing Eyemo Rolls project.
Eyemo Roll #86 (Taiwan projectionist)
George Clark / April 2016 / Taiwan, UK / 2′ / 35mm / silent
Eyemo Roll # 230-233 (Hokkaido)
George Clark / April 2023 / UK, Japan / 3′ / 35mm / silent
Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification
Barbara McCullough / 1979 / USA / 6′ / 35mm / sound
Eyemo Rolls #57-60 (Los Angeles)
George Clark / August 2014 / UK, USA / 4′ / 35mm / silent
Eyemo Rolls #16-17 & #74-75 (Hong Kong)
George Clark / Jan 2012, February 2016 / UK, Hong Kong / 5′ / 35mm / silent
Black landscape #6
Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai / 2018-20 / Vietnam / 8′ / digital / sound
Eyemo Rolls #81-84 (Lake Taal, Philippines)
George Clark / February 2016 / 35mm / 5′ / silent
Sunless Haven
George Clark / 2024 / UK / 32′ / digital / Mandarin and English spoken
Following the screening historian Dr. Simeon Koole led the Within Worlds Docklands Walk on Sunday 28 April.. In conversation with the film Sunless Haven, Koole takes us to the remaining traces of the seamen’s lodging houses, wharves, water stairs, “strangers’ homes” for Asian sailors, and streets of London’s first Chinatown. Along the way, we’ll ask: how were the bodies and senses of docklands inhabitants shaped by global connections – and how has this changed today?
