Essay Film Festival 2017: A Critical Eye For Critical Times

The essay film is doubly an act of criticism. It engages critically with the forms of cinema and at the same times casts a critical eye on the world that cinema inhabits.

The selection of films for this year's edition of the Essay Film Festival showcases a striking, inspirational diversity of cutting-edge practice and charged political critique from around the globe, encompassing self-portraiture, video-essay activism, collage, the diary form, poetry as anti-colonial gesture and meditations on landscape and the often bloody histories layered and rooted therein. Coursing through the entire programme is a keenly felt apprehension of how the present connects with the past, how the individual connects with the social body and how seeing is inflected by power and ideology – preoccupations that seem especially urgent and pertinent at this troubled juncture.

We are particularly delighted and honoured to welcome the celebrated director and cinematographer Babette Mangolte to the festival for two special screenings of her essay work. Born in France but a resident of the USA for many years, Mangolte’s unique, unclassifiable body of work stretches back to the mid-1970's and incorporates reflections on her own processes in relation to capturing human subjects and landscapes on film.
 
Find out more about the Essay Film Festival, including events taking place at Birkbeck and the Goethe-Institut

We are offering a special multibuy offer for Essay Film Festival 2017:

- if you purchase tickets for 3-4 screenings pay £9 (full price) / £7 (concessions) / £6 (ICA Members) per ticket
- If you purchase tickets for 5-6 screenings pay £8 (full price) / £6 (concessions) / £5 (ICA Members) per ticket