Filmmaker Huw Wahl will visit CAST to talk about his film The Republics, described by Gareth Evans, Moving Image Curator at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, as ‘one of the most impressive artists’ films of recent years, whose own poetry speaks as honestly and eloquently as that of the writer it portrays’.
Huw Wahl’s luminously beautiful 16mm documentary was made in response to the work of poet, translator and activist Stephen Watts. The film takes Watts’s book-length prose poem Republic of Dogs / Republic of Birds as its script and travels with Watts as he moves from North Uist in Scotland’s Western Isles to London’s Isle of Dogs to the mountains of Northern Italy.
Shot in black and white, using a Bolex ‘wind-up’ camera, and developed by hand in Huw Wahl’s basement, the film has a visceral quality that captures the relationship between language and landscape at the heart of Watts’s work.
During his visit to Cornwall, Huw Wahl will continue his research for a new project, Wind, Tide and Oar, which explores the extraordinary combination of skill and absorbed attention practised by those few exceptional sailors who are still prepared to go to sea in boats without engines.
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The Republics will be screened at CAST from 8 June to 10 July, open Tuesday to Saturday, 11am – 5pm. Read more.