About this Event
“Just another woman who writes to prisoners.”
So said the BBC commissioning editor when I proposed a film developed through years of writing to Keith, a man who had spent much of his life in solitary confinement in the United States.
Those words stayed with me.
Keith had first appeared in my film The Divide. After it came out, I suggested that we might make another when he was released - a road trip through America, retracing his teenage steps 25 years later. What followed was an eight-year correspondence: letters about confinement, freedom, filmmaking, trust, and what it might mean to try to represent one person’s experience of the world to another.
That correspondence now forms the starting point for Four Windows and a Room, an installation made from letters, footage, objects and space, asking how - and whether - we can enter another person’s experience.
But the commissioning editor’s words opened up a whole new set of questions for me. What kind of story had I been placed inside - and who gets to write those scripts? Who is permitted to form certain relationships, enter certain spaces or make certain kinds of work? And what happens when a woman crosses a boundary she has been told, implicitly or explicitly, not to cross?
For this event, I’m joined by filmmaker Penny Woolcock, who has made much of her work by building trust and relationships with people from marginalised communities, across documentaries and street-cast fiction.
Through clips and an open conversation, we’ll explore the complicated reality of these apparently “impossible relationships”: the intimacy they require, the power they contain, what they make possible - and what they can cost.
We’ll also be joined by Simeon Moore, a music artist, community advocate and leader whose work is informed by his own lived experience of street culture, the criminal justice system and personal transformation. A long-standing collaborator of Penny’s, Simeon contributed to the documentary One Mile Away and the social enterprise that developed from it, as well as several short-film projects. He and Penny are currently developing a film/TV series exploring the continuing loss of young boys and men to knife and gun violence.
We’ll ask: Who gets to go where? Who gets to speak for whom? What responsibilities survive after the camera stops? And what does it mean, in the twenty-first century, to be a woman who goes somewhere she has been told she shouldn’t?
The event will be held on Monday 21st September, 5.30 - 8.30pm, UCL East (Marshgate), 7 Sidings Street, London. Full details will be emailed on registration.
The event is free to attend, but registration is required.
Event venue & nearby stays
UCL East - Marshgate, 7 Sidings Street, Barking, United Kingdom
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.