For Remembrance Day, DIM Cinema presents Stella Polare, an immersive essay film on the nature of war, terror and resistance; loss, memory and forgetting. The soft voice of an anonymous narrator addresses us, the viewers, in the second person, situating us behind the camera as flâneurs casting our stranger’s gaze across an unnamed European city. There we encounter some of the town’s inhabitants strolling along a jetty in the fading evening light, peer into shop windows in half-deserted streets, and drift through the interiors of 19th-century apartments and museums, following the “dusted faded traces of a glorious imperial past.” From these images, and from fragments of sounds and voices, develops a forensic narrative around “past histories, events and incidents that bleed into the present” (Andy Birtwhistle, Vertigo Magazine).

 

Stella Polare | Great Britain 2006. Dir: Anthea Kennedy and Ian Wiblin. 76 min. Beta SP 

 

Anthea Kennedy studied fine art in Leeds and film at the Royal College of Art, London. As well as making her own films, she has worked as a film editor, often with the late Stephen Dwoskin. Her work has received awards, including a Hubert Bals Award at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.

 

In addition to his filmmaking, Ian Wiblin is a photographer whose work has been exhibited internationally. A monograph of his photographs, Night Watch, was published during his artist residency at Kettle's Yard, University of Cambridge.

 

Kennedy and Wiblin have been making films together since 2000. Their work takes the form of experimental documentary or essay films, focusing on place, history and memory. These have been shown at international festivals and galleries including Rotterdam, EMAF, Thessaloniki, Athens Ohio, Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery London and Collection Regard Berlin. 

 

 “A lyrical meditation on memory, history and violent political activism” (Geoff Andrew, Time Out, Rotterdam Film Festival review).

 

Programmed by Michèle Smith