The director couldn’t have anticipated the coronavirus epidemic, but here is a near-future world in which a middle-class protagonist lives indoors, congratulating himself on the economic virtues of having ingested ‘animal condensed’ –  an unexplained substance that seems to merge human and animal – and its benefits to his comfortably alienated life. “It optimises, it abstracts… it made us safe, here at home, with our accelerated portfolios”, he explains. Upstairs, his daughter virtually reconfigures Peppa Pig.  Outside, meanwhile, hiding in the forest, is an unnamed, camouflaged fugitive, who explains her escape from a society that seems to have happily abolished the distinction between organic and technological life. An artist who has become a guerrilla fighter, the woman is busy preparing totem-like countermeasures to disrupt those who have become ‘animal expanded’.

ANIMAL CONDENSED>>ANIMAL EXPANDED#2

Prestidigitation before the age of the pixel. Very lively stop motion and open shutter piece, all done in camera – but transferred to video for ease of viewing.

Magic Explained

Work, film, work, film, work – day to day – week to week. This is a home movie domestic comedy experimental film drama. Autobiography too. It’s also part four of an ever-growing trilogy.  Starting in 2003 I decided to make a series of pieces alongside my regular films, a strand that would constitute an ongoing fictional autobiography. But as all creative work is, to some extent, autobiographical, and as I appear in most of my films, and all the people in these films are who they say they are, then what made this different from the rest – or from real life, really – became kind of blurred. Fuzzy even.  So this is fuzzy fiction – latest in the line.