Filmmaker in Focus: MORGAN QUAINTANCE
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Synopsis
Morgan Quaintance is one of the most vital artist filmmakers working today. His practice reflects a strikingly unique approach to film form, and his growing body of work sits at an arresting confluence of the personal and the political. Having screened two of his films at THFF20, we are pleased this year to present this focus on Quaintance featuring three new and recent works.
Surviving You, Always
Dir. Morgan Quaintance / 18 mins / 2020 / United Kingdom
The transcendental promise of psychedelic drugs versus a concrete and violent experience of metropolitan living: these two opposing realities form the backdrop for an adolescent encounter told through still images and written narration.
Missing Time
Dir. Morgan Quaintance / 15 minutes / 2019 / United Kingdom
Through a focus on alien abduction, Cold War history, and Britain’s colonial history, Missing Time is a film that considers the relation between amnesia, concealed histories, state secrecy, and the constitution of the self.
South
Dir. Morgan Quaintance / 28 minutes / 2020 / United Kingdom
Taking two anti-racist and anti-authoritarian liberation movements in South London and Chicago’s South Side as a point of departure, South presents an expressionistic investigation of the power of individual and collective voice. Interlinked with the filmmaker’s own biography (time spent living in both London and Chicago), the film also considers questions of mortality and the will to transcend a world typified by concrete relations.
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About the Director
Morgan Quaintance’s moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including MoMA, New York; Mcevoy Foundaton for the Arts, San Francisco; Konsthall C, Sweden; David Dale, Glasgow; European Media Art Festival, Germany; Alchemy Film and Arts Festival, Scotland; Images Festival, Toronto; International Film Festival Rotterdam; and Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami. He is the recipient of the 2021 Jean Vigo Prize for Best Director at Punto de Vista, Spain, for the film Surviving You, Always (THFF21); the 2020 Best Experimental Film award at Curtas Vila Do Conje, Portugal, and the 2020 New Vision Award at CPH:DOX, both for the film South (THFF21). Over the past ten years, Morgan’s critically incisive writings on contemporary art, aesthetics and their socio-political contexts have featured in publications including Art Monthly, the Wire, and the Guardian, and helped shape the landscape of discourse and debate in the UK. A key reference here is his 2017 text The New Conservatism: Complicity and the UK Art World’s Performance of Progression, available here: https://conversations.e-flux.com.
