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Mascara Film Club


Mascara Film Club is an artist-run film club, which mostly takes place in North-East London. Taking place outside both film festival circuits and institutional art spaces, we screen artists’ moving image in more convivial contexts. We understand film screenings defined less as the relation between film and spectators in hushed rooms, but rather as performative and social events where the critical intimacies of friendship and community can come to the fore. Through our programming we seek to bring into conversation films and people, and foster a self-organised infrastructure for moving image practitioners.

Mascara Film Club is organised by Rufus Rock,  Daisy Smith and Katarzyna Łukasik.

Say hello ︎︎︎ mascarafilmclub@gmail.com
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Mascara Film Club



Mascara Film Club is an artist-run film club, which mostly takes place in North-East London. Taking place outside institutional art spaces, we screen artists’ moving image in more convivial contexts. We understand film screenings defined less as the relation between film and spectators in hushed rooms, but rather as performative and social events where the critical intimacies of friendship and community can come to the fore. Through our programming we 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 Katarzyna Łukasik, Rufus Rock and Daisy Smith. 








Past



#30
Ed Webb-Ingall, Frank Sweeney


Sunday 2 June 2024, 6pm
Location: Atlas Cinema, Junction, 5 Gastineau Yard, Loughborough SW9 7FA

Programme:
Few Can See, Frank Sweeney, 2024 (42 mins)
We Have Rather Been Invaded, Ed Webb-Ingall, 2017 (40 mins)

Tickets




Mascara Film Club presents a double-bill of films by artists Ed Webb-Ingall and Frank Sweeney, both investigating the televisual politics of the 1970/80s and the struggles of community activists within Ireland and Great Britain.

Frank Sweeney’s Few Can See (2024) examines the legacy of broadcast censorship of the conflict in the north of Ireland and political movements during this era. The project attempts to recreate material absent from state archives due to censorship, based on contemporary oral history interviews.

Ed Webb-Ingall’s We Have Rather Been Invaded (2017) explores the legacy of Section 28, a series of laws introduced by Margaret Thatcher that banned the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities in the UK. Composed of archival material and roundtable interviews with those affected by the homophobic legislation, this video takes a key moment of protest as its focus – the invasion of a broadcast of the BBC Six O’Clock News by four lesbian protestors on May 23rd 1988, the night before Section 28 became law.




#29
Clémence Lollia Hilaire, John Smith, Ghita Skali, Daisy Smith, Bayley Sweitzer, Adam Khalil & Oba


Sunday 5th May 2024, 7.30pm
Location: Marais Moeras, Av. Van Volxem 380, 1190 Forest, Brussels

Programme:
Nosferasta: First Bite, Adam Khalil, Bayley Sweitzer & Oba, 2021 (30 minutes)
The Eiffel Towers, Ghita Skali, 2013 (12 mins)
The Black Tower, John Smith, 1985-7 (24 mins)
Lily at Home, Daisy Smith, 2023 (4 mins)
Harvest, Clémence Lollia Hilaire, 2023 (15 mins)




Mascara 29 presents five films that have at their core themes of ownership and control, with portraits of people stuck in the fever dream worlds that result from colonial and capitalist invasions. Screened here amidst the marshland nearby, and with the redevelopment of the building looming, we will sit with vampires, property managers, zombies and city planning officers. Revenge fantasies and cautionary tales abound.




#28 
Emily Wardill, Ellie Bird & Harriet Rickard


Saturday 20 April 2024, 6pm
Location: Close-Up Film Centre, 97 Sclater Street,
London E1 6HR

Book tickets here

Programme: 
Fine I Shall Tell You a Story, Ellie Bird, 2023 (6 mins)
siblings, Harriet Rickard, 2021 (2 mins)
When You Fall into a Trance, Emily Wardill, 2014 (72 mins)



For the 28th iteration of Mascara Film Club we will focus on imperfect narrators, child's play and the dead-ends of language. When You Fall into a Trance, a feature by Emily Wardill, will be screened alongside Fine I Shall Tell You a Story by Ellie Bird and siblings by Harriet Rickard.




#27
Dina Mimi, Kamal Aljafari
(Palestine Fundraiser Screening)



Saturday 6 April 2024, 7.30pm
Location: Black Tower Projects, Abbey Trading Estate
Bell Green Lane, London SE26 5TW

Book tickets here

Programme:
The Melancholy of this Useless Afternoon Chapter 1, Dina Mimi, 2023 (12 mins)
The Melancholy of this Useless Afternoon Chatper 2, Dina Mimi, 2023 (11 mins)
Recollection, Kamal Aljafari, 2015 (1hr 10 mins)




Two films by Dina Mimi The Melancholy of this Useless Afternoon Chapters 1 and 2 pair revolutionary songs from Oman, Yemen and Palestine with a tired speaker at the end of the phone, her fragmented conversation describing a loss, fugitive movement and thoughts on revolution. Kamal Aljafari’s Recollection is a contemplative unravelling of a violent archive. The Israeli and American features shot in the town of Jaffa from the 60s to the 90s are the basis for the history of a dream. All protagonists are removed from the original footage, leaving an empty setting formed by the town. Examinations of erasure and exposure are recurrent in this fundraiser screening.

Tickets are £5 and we will be accepting donations on the night. Proceeds from ticket sales will go towards this fundraiser. Please consider donating to provide vital support to Lina’s family during an ongoing genocide and violent occupation.


#26:
Hannan Jones, Dina Mimi, Onyeka Igwe, Jacob Dwyer, Gabriel Abrantes

Thursday 6th April 2023 7.30pm
Location: P/////AKT, Amsterdam

Programme:
Working Knowledge of Ritual, Hannan Jones, 2023 (4 mins)
The eyes that never see, Dina Mimi, 2021, (12 mins)
We Need New Names, Onyeka Igwe, 2015 (14 mins)
Donovan Garcia, Jacob Dwyer, 2017 (7 mins)
A Brief History of Princess X, Gabriel Abrantes, 2016 (7 mins)



Mascara film club presents a programme that looks 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.


#25:
Uriel Orlow, 
Lenka Vráblíková and Elspeth Mitchell, Rehana Zaman


Wednesday 9 November 2022, 7.30pm
Location: MayDay Rooms

︎︎︎TICKETS

Programme:
The Crown Against Mafavuke, Uriel Orlow, 2016 (18 mins)
Out of Office: Mycorrhizal encounters and the art of feminist un/learning, Lenka Vráblíková and Elspeth Mitchell, 2021 (21 minutes)
Alternative Economies, Rehana Zaman, 2021 (28 minutes)





Mascara Film Club presents a group screening of three films by Uriel Orlow, Lenka Vráblíková and Elspeth Mitchell, and Rehana Zaman. Exploring entanglements between knowledge, nature and truth production, these films focus on different and often devalued modes of understanding presented through mediations between plants, fungi and people. Working at the junctures between epistemes, here plants and mushrooms offer opportunities for learning and un/learning across ideologies and cultures.

Tickets can be booked via Eventbrite for free. However, we kindly ask attendees to donate £5 if they can, which goes directly towards paying artist's screening fees. Donations can be made on the door. Mascara Film Club is a volunteer-run artist collective.


#25: 
Avril Corroon


29 October – 23 November 2022
Online





Mascara Film Club presents an online screening of Avril Corroon’s film Spoiled Spores (2019), free to watch on our website.

Responding to neglected housing conditions in rental property in Ireland and London, Spoiled Spores is a film showcasing cheeses made with a culture of household mould (black mould) sampled from rental accommodation in Dublin and London. Participants were found through Avril's extended network of peers and call outs online - each cheese is named after the individual participant.  Adopting aesthetics of commercial food photography, the cheese in Spoiled Spores is stylised with menus outlining its provenance, ingredients, rental fees and mould type.