Onwards and Outwards: Where I Am is Here + Orlando

Where I Am is Here

Basing her film around the logic of everyday experience, Margaret Tait enables close study into the most ordinary aspects of life to bring about fresh revelation. Where I am is Here marks Tait’s first venture into longer durations, developing her use of contemplative imagery alongside music commissioned from celebrated Scottish fiddler, Hector MacAndrew. Image and sound often stand in opposition, developing a mindful viewpoint through counterpoint that offers newfound appreciation of the more commonplace aspects of life.

"Where I am is here is a focus on the tenousness of the journey to wherever it is we are, and the giving over of the self, first to the seeming shapelessness and meaninglessness then the unexpected shapeliness and beauty of where it is we are, and last, a suggestion that we simply give ourselves over to the astonishing and everyday richness of the experience of being here." Ali Smith

Where I Am is Here, dir. Margaret Tait, UK 1964, 33 mins.

Orlando

Based on Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando is the story of someone who lives for four hundred years, changing sex in the course of time.

As a young nobleman, Orlando (Tilda Swinton) is granted the Crown deeds to his parents’ ancestral home by the ageing Queen Elizabeth I on one condition: “Do not fade. Do not wither. Do not grow old”. After a failed romance with a Russian Princess Orlando becomes the Ambassador to the Court of Khan. War breaks out and Orlando, facing a terrible challenge for a man - to kill or be killed - changes sex. She returns to the formal salons of eighteenth-century England and discovers that as a woman she has little social status, and worse, no legal rights to either her title or her property. Here she also discovers sex in the arms of an American adventurer and ultimately loses both love and inheritance when she refuses to abandon her own path in order to follow his. Alone, Orlando finally emerges into the twentieth century as an ordinary individual who, in losing everything, has found herself.

Orlando, dir. Sally Potter, USA 1993, 94 mins.

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Onwards and Outwards is a nationwide programme of screenings, talks, and events, which aims to establish a dialogue around the conditions of production that women face when attempting to use the moving image as a means of expression.

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Onwards and Outwards is made possible with support from the BFI, awarding funds from The National Lottery.