Movies: Miranda Pennell

An archival investigation into the imperial image-making of the RAF ‘Z Unit’, which determined the destruction of human, animal and cultural life across Somaliland, as well as Africa and Asia....

Gaza, December 2023. A confrontation with a disturbing photograph on social media triggers questions about what it means to be an onlooker....

While investigating her late parents’ involvement with the Anglo Iranian Oil Company (BP), the filmmaker comes across the letters of a petroleum geologist in Iran in the 1930s who was later to embark on a search for the origins of civilisation. The H...

Back stroke butterfly, front crawl and bras, we are awash in an ocean of bubbles. Meanwhile Captain Ahab sets sail on his magic carpet in search of the whale. All is not well in the world but Eden is there, fresh from her garden, tuning into “The Far...

The memoirs of a medical missionary on the Afghan borderlands provides the starting point for a film constructed from still photographs of colonial life on the North West frontier of British India at the turn of the 20th century. The film plays sound...

A strange presence is haunting the images in the Crawford Collection, at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, and spreading across the city of London: an echo of the curse of the Pharaohs, a spectral menace is manifesting itself in the form of a mysteri...

One of a series of films combining music and images: an office cleaner, and what happens to some of the people who work in the building....

The empty spaces of an ambiguous building open-up to reveal a group of aspiring musicians as they play together, alone. Drum Room reflects on relationships between individual and group, as young musicians express their collective and individual iden...

People dance in private moments of personal abandon across London in the summer of 2001. The film is the result of the director’s work with the first ten respondents to a local newspaper advertisement that she placed seeking ‘living-room dancers’ – p...

Twenty-one dancers are held by your gaze. Losing contact can be traumatic. Twenty-one dancers play a game of cat and mouse with an unpredictable camera. Disoriented, the viewer is fixed by the gaze of dancers who crowd the frame. …On the one hand t...