Metaphor for life

Each, however, share the documentary film-maker’s preoccupation with describing people and places.

Mark Boulos’s The Word Was God (pictured) simply trains a camera on a group of exuberant worshippers rocking, swaying and praising the Lord at a Pentecostal church. But there is little that is as straightforward in the other pieces and the seeming objectivity of the documentary film-maker falls away in favour of something layered, elusive and disturbing.

By far the most unsettling is Stephen Connolly’s Film For Tom, in which a voice-over and a sequence of still and moving images relate a story of a murdered man. The compelling narration talks of a search for identity, but, though the words are obviously not the man’s own, there is something fitting in the incongruity of the elderly, patrician voice and the collage of images. We’re presented with a jigsaw, and an apt metaphor for the piecing together of a lost life.

The marrying of images with incongruous narration provides another moving sample of shorts, each less than a minute long, from Stephen Sutcliffe. A poem by Christopher Logue, Come To The Edge, lingers long after the grainy images of schoolboys mock-fighting fade away.

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If: People & Places In Recent Film & Video
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