Sunless Haven
2024, UK, 16mm, sound, colour, 32 min
Animating a host of dispersed fragments from historical documents to architectural remnants and the river, Sunless Haven looks at the docklands as a resonant chamber connecting desperate worlds.” Working with historians Simeon Koole and Ben Mechen, sound artist Jol Thoms and performance artist Yarli Allison the film seeks 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 know 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.
World premiere as Opening Night Film at Open City Documentary Film Festival at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 24 April 2024
Credits:
Image/Sound: George Clark
Music: Jol Thoms
Sound: Jol Thoms & George Clark
Amah Recreations: Yalli Allisan
Historians: Simeon Koole & Ben Mechen
Cast:
Amah: Joy Chao
Limehouse resident: Yarli Allisan
Priest: George Clark
Dockworker: Jol Thoms
Texts:
‘伦敦大雾行 / The Ballad of the Great London Fog’, Huang Zunxian, c.1890-92,
translated by Zhiyi Yang
Common Lodging Houses and Seamen’s Lodging Houses. Register of Police Court Proceedings, 1895-1914, London Metropolitan Archives
Depositions by William Richard Gillard, son of deceased William Gillard and Dr
Thomas Massie, Medical Officer of Workhouse, Mint Street, Borough, Southwark Coroner’s Court, 27th August 1908
Letter from Gerald Fitzgerald, India Office referred to the Public Department, 26 July 1890
Letter from the Strangers Home for Asiatics to Gerald Fitzgerald, India Office, 26 January 1891
Letter from Tomas May to Directors of The Grand Surrey Canal Company, 13
February 1869
‘二馬 / Mr. Ma and Son,’ Lao She, 1929, translated by William Dolby
Filmed on 16mm Fujifilm and Kodak stock in London 2023-24
Film Processing: Color by DeJonghe & Kodak Film Lab London
Commissioned by Simeon Koole & Ben Mechen as part of Within Worlds project supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/W000059/1)
Additional support: CREAM University of Westminster.
Thanks to: Eiko Soga, May Adadol Ingawanij, Neal White, Ben Cook