Credit: Bea Macdonald (featured thumbnail image)
Mascara Film Club presents a selection of four artist shorts that use voiceover and conversation to explore themes around memory, identity, and place. Using personal testimony as an intimate way to connect individual experience with wider social and political contexts, the films in this programme variously address international adoption, migration, urban development, and community.
Hope Strickland’s Home Soon Come (2020) is a documentary with the elderly Caribbean community in South Manchester with scenes shot at the African-Caribbean Care Group (ACCG) and interviews in family homes. Digital footage is edited with archival footage from a 1926 travelogue ‘Christmas around the Caribbean Sea’, to explore slowness, diasporic movements, memory-placing through domestic objects.
Rachel McBrinn’s Are you going my way? (2023) is a film rooted in the artist’s hometown Livingston, one of Scotland’s five post-war New Towns. With contributions from Dean Swift, former landscape architect for the Livingston Development Corporation, and residents (past and present) of Deans South, one of the first council housing schemes in Livingston which at the time of filming was undergoing demolition, the film positions the town as a home for divergent and complex narratives which emerge from cycles of building and demolition, growing and felling, planning and waiting.
Bea Macdonald’s short Iris (2022) takes its name from a curtain shop on Deptford High Street in South London. Macdonald’s film uses the reference to the eye as a motif to think about moments of privacy and concealment alongside moments of openness, as the camera floats along the street. Capturing off guard moments, conversations reveal moments of dreams and intimacy.
Artist and educator José Mario Dellow’s film Extract from a conversation between two Guatemalan adoptees: Part 2 (2025) is the second iteration in an ongoing series of dialogues between the artist and fellow Guatemalan adoptees. Exploring their experiences of international adoption and growing up in the UK, the film layers conversation with photographs from the artist’s personal adoption archive and digital screen grabs of Guatemalan people, objects, and places, including Jutiapa, the Guatemalan department that is the shared birthplace of both the film’s speakers. Here, Dellow revisits a format they first explored several years ago, reflectively tracing the subjects’ evolving relationships to their adoption stories.
Programme:
Bea Macdonald: Iris, 2022 (5 mins)
Rachel McBrinn, Are you going my way?, 2023 (23 mins)
José Mario Dellow, Extract from a conversation between two Guatemalan adoptees: Part 2, 2025 (23 mins)
Hope Strickland, Home Soon Come, 2020 (20 mins)
Total running time: 1hr 11mins.
Doors open: 8pm. Films start at 8.30pm
About 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.
The Newington Green Meeting House is the home of New Unity, a radically inclusive community of love and justice. This event is a partnership event, with space offered by New Unity's arts programme Arts on the Green. Arts on the Green exists to provide flexible space to arts practitioners bringing high quality culture to our community.
For accessibility info, please visit this page.
For any specific accessibility requirements or for any queries, please email: arts@new-unity.org by Friday 23rd May 2025 at 12pm.
