Mascara Film Club is an artist-run film club, which mostly takes place in North-East London. Through their programming they seek to bring into conversation films and people, and foster a self-organised infrastructure for moving image practitioners. Mascara Film Club is currently organised by Kasia Lukasik, Rufus Rock and Daisy Smith. For the second iteration of the programme hosted by P/////AKT, Mascara 26 presents works that look at portraits of people that cannot be filmed, whether this be through impossibility or concealment. Fact, fiction and construction play out across five films that propose alternative depictions or awkward documents.
Programme:
Working Knowledge of Ritual, Hannan Jones, 2023 (4 mins)
Working Knowledge of Ritual is a portrait infused with the power of Pagan beliefs and esoteric teachings, a sharing of ancestral wisdom, the reflections of deep love, and glimpses of cherished yet wild perennial cultivation. Mediated and channeled by avid herbalist and spiritualist Leonard Jones (b.1931-2022, Cwm, Wales). Directed and edited by artist Hannan Jones (b. 1990, Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia).
The eyes that never see, Dina Mimi, 2021, (12 mins)
Ram(z)I is a lonely, working-class man who died twice. Ram(z)I was renamed as soon as his first body died to die again in Jerusalem, buried under a dusty ground while digging for artifacts of a 6000 year-old ancient city. This film explores the obsession of a settler state that continuously excavates to find artifacts to trace history and invent a new one.
We Need New Names, Onyeka Igwe, 2015 (14 mins)
An essay video work examining contemporary Nigerian diasporic female identity through the contradictions inherent to an ethnographic reading of the funeral of the filmmakers’ family matriarch. Using personal archive to explore the concepts of female identity, diaspora, cultural memory and most importantly ‘fiction’.
Donovan Garcia, Jacob Dwyer, 2017 (7 mins)
Donovan Garcia was shot in one day on a trip from New Orleans to Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve; a swamp in which Banana spiders flourish.
A Brief History of Princess X, Gabriel Abrantes, 2016 (7 mins)
From Gabriel Abrantes comes a supercharged history of sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s infamous ‘Princess X’, a futuristic bronze phallus that is actually a bust portrait of Napoleon’s equally infamous great grand niece, Marie Bonaparte.
