Festival ECRÃ
of Experimental and Art and Cinema
Pair
PEER
Lee Campbell
United Kingdom
2022
Performance
Short Film
Innovating the possibilities of media reuse, text feedback and looping, and the layering of voices, this multi-layered socio-creative live Zoom performance is a colourful, immersive, textured, organic and disorienting montage of my memories of the coast.
PAR (2020) is rooted in the Kent/Sussex coastline and features footage, images and drawings on shells and postcards of places/people/objects made along the coast since I was a child – my own version of scrimshaw. The images are juxtaposed with a poem I wrote that explains the meaning of the coastline to me, featuring my family and friends. It captures the strangeness of the British coastline using a telescope that acts as a voyeuristic blinking eye. It reuses performance documentation and footage from my archive as an artist, including performances and drawings. The locations of the moving images and the drawings on the shells and postcards were filmed/drawn along the Kent coast, including Herne Bay, Margate, Whitstable, Sheerness-on-Sea and Dover - all seaside towns I loved going to as a child growing up in Kent in the 1980s. Black and white drawings reminiscent of the work of artists William Kentridge and Tacita Dean tell a dark narrative through their nostalgia interspersed with snapshots of human activity that capture the vibes of the seaside. It may be easy to watch, but there is much to take away from it. PEER follows LET RIP: THE BEAUTIFUL GAME as a very observant work of English leisure rituals, in locations that offer snapshots of a less cosmopolitan England, of Englishness and a nostalgia for an England that may or may not have existed. A Britain that is content with the beaches we have.
On the surface level, the film is made up of just three simple elements: 1) a mechanical viewfinder eye 2) the word ‘pair’ 3) footage from behind. It may be easy to watch, but there’s a lot to take away from it. Bringing together disparate images and allowing viewers to draw their own story, What’s ‘Seen Through’ a Telescope combines nostalgia, British cheekiness, slapstick and a play on words (stop, pier etc.) The telescope eye used as a mask throughout the performance is constantly trying to focus.
general information
edition
6th ECRÃ Festival
venues
17/07 - ONLINE - Zoom - 5pm (Brasília Time) - 9pm (UK Time Zone)
duration in min
15
premiere
World Premiere 6th ECRÃ Festival
indicative classification
L / Free for all audiences / Free for All Audiences
trailer/teaser/excerpt
content
-
tags
art house, children's
Lee Campbell
Dr Lee Campbell is an artist, poet, experimental filmmaker, writer, senior lecturer at the University of the Arts London, curator of the regular performance poetry night POW? Play on Words in South London and founder of Homo Humor, the first project of its kind in contemporary queer male film and moving image practices exploring LGBTQ+ humor and storytelling.
Lee’s experimental performance poetry films have been selected for many international film festivals since 2019, including Queerbee LGBT Film Festival, The Gilbert Baker Film Festival, Kansas 2020 and 2021, HOMOGRAPHY, Brussels and STATES OF DESIRE: Tom of Finland in the Queer Imagination, Casa de Duende, Philadelphia, USA, 2020 WICKED QUEER 2021, Boston, USA, FilmPride - Brighton & Hove Pride’s official LGBTQ+ film festival, Brighton, UK, Splice Film Festival 2021, Brooklyn, USA and Darkroom Festival, London
In 2022, Lee’s films have already been selected to screen at these prestigious events/festivals: Beyond Words curated by Gabriel Sosa, Fountain Street Gallery, Boston USA, Micromania Film Festival and The Football Art Prize, UK touring exhibition for Touchstones Rochdale, Millennium Gallery, Sheffield Museum and Sunderland and Winter Gardens.
He has won numerous awards/nominations for these films including Winner of Best Psychedelic Fantasy Film for ‘See Me’ (2020), Retro Avant Garde Film Festival NYC 2021, Semi-Finalist at Serbest International Film Festival 2021, Honorable Mention and Semi-Finalist Winner at Splice Film Festival, New York (2020 and 2021), Nominee for Best Original Concept and Best Atmospheric Independent Horror Film 2021, Honorable Mention, Screener Short Films 2020, Nominee for Best Feature Kent, Margate Bookie Film Festival, 2020 and Special Mention Award, London-Worldwide Comedy Short Film Festival, 2019.
Lee has been interviewed numerous times about his current film/performance work including interviews with Daniel Hess for To Tony Productions, Tim Kirk, Matt Skallerud for I Love Gay Today/Pink Media LGBT, Hamish Downie’s Five Questions With – Lee Campbell (March 2020), and The New York Times (March 2020). 2021) BBC Radio Kent - Interview with Dominic King for The Dominic King Show in January 2021. His film work has received critical acclaim with recent review features of his film work by Francesca de Luca in Cut Frame Magazine and James Clark in Lost Creatives.
His live Zoom poetry performances have been featured this year at events including Disturbance#2, Ugly Duck, London, Theatre Deli, London Festival ECRÃ Edition 5, Rio de Janeiro, and the Immersive Storytelling Symposium, Lakeside Arts Centre, Nottingham. In October 2021.
more information
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