The film explores notions of home and belonging in contemporary society. Comprising interviews with workers at the Edo Tokyo Open Air Architecture Museum in Tokyo, and fragments of conversations with renters in that city and London, a productive dialectic opens between the museum’s preserved historical ideal of the domestic and the often unsettling realities of temporary accommodation in modern cities. Combining trademark immersive sound design with impressionistic images and abstractions, Quaintance crafts an austere, oneiric and subtly affecting portrait of residential precarity.

Available Light

A montage of 1990s-era archival video and recent footage, exhuming cultural debates from history’s grave to re-animate a once-promised future, still to arrive.

Another Decade

Letter from Tokyo is a documentary film that looks at art, culture and politics in Tokyo, Japan. Shot over three months during the summer of 2018, and with a particular focus on grass roots arts initiatives, the use of public space, and queer politics, the film provides a snapshot of Japan’s capital in the run up to the 2020 olympics.

Letter from Tokyo

A portrait of Jamaican-born artistic polymath Barbara Samuels. Featuring an account of her first generation, diasporic experience in Southend and London, and her discovery of hippiedom and the personal freedoms offered by entry into creative life.

Early Years

Commissioned for S-AIR’s 2020 residency programme, Letter from Sapporo (2021) is a collage film offering a glimpse of daily life in the Japanese city of Sapporo. The film is the product of approximately 16 participants capturing material with their smartphones. Focusing on moments of stillness, intimacy, labour and humour, disparate material is wedded into a compelling and coherent whole by Quaintance’s subtle editing, original music and vivid sound design.

Letter From Sapporo

The proposed metaphysical highs of psychedelic drugs versus the harsh actualities of concrete metropolitan life. These two opposing realities form the backdrop of an adolescent encounter in the city of London, told through still images and written narration.

Surviving You, Always

An exercise in observing repetition, following patterns and deciphering loops. Drawing focus through the lull of recurring images and repeating sounds, a clearer image emerges of industrialised labour and the vulnerable bodies of those performing it. This film finds a rhythm, much a like a machine, to manifest the misgivings of the working class.

Repetitions

Combining low resolution footage, 16mm film and satellite imagery, Efforts of Nature considers the passage of time, processes of change and dissolution from two distant perspectives: the existential level of the body and the planetary level of shifting geological conditions.