Richard James Allen
2021
I want to make a film about women
Karen Pearlman
Richard James Allen, Victoria Haralabidou
'I want to make a film about women' is a speculative documentary love letter to Russian constructivist women. The new Soviet Union of the 1920s championed equality for women and great innovation in the creative arts. Until it didn't. Looking back at that time, history remembers the men who were celebrated and then shut down. But women were there, too, and they were influential, powerful and brilliant. 'I want to make a film about women' gazes in to a creative communal kitchen and watches these women transform it into a workshop, then a stage set, then a film, all the while juggling noisy men and the wolves of history. It imagines what the revolutionary women artists of the 1920s said, what they did, and what they might have created had it not been for Stalin's suppression.
I want to make a film about women
Thursday's Fictions
Richard James Allen
Thursday’s 24 hours are almost up. In a world in which people live only for the length of a day, she is running out of time. But Thursday has a plan. She finds out that she will be reincarnated as Tuesday and packs all that she has created into a trunk in an effort to continue her work when she comes back in her next life… Thursday’s Fictions has the raw intensity, epic dimensions and fantastical imagery of legend or myth. Director/Choreographer Richard James Allen has created a rich world filled with intriguing ideas and stunning imagery. Thursday’s Fictions follows the plight of seven characters as they each come into contact with the mysterious trunk Thursday has left in their care. They grapple with the passion, beauty, dreams and nightmares which it contains, embarking on a magical journey encompassing sumptuous dance, original orchestral music and lavish design. It is a film whose images, sounds and ideas will resound far longer than the seven days its story traces.
Thursday's Fictions
Text Messages from the Universe
Richard James Allen
Richard James Allen, Jay Bailey
A film that immerses its audience in subjective states of consciousness they might experience when they die, imagining what they can see and think and hear in a seamless but fragmentary flow of poetic images, words and music. The viewer undertakes a journey into their own interior world of dreams and projections in which time and space, and cause and effect logic, are turned on their heads. Text Messages from the Universe is inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a text which guides souls on their journey of 49 days through the 'Bardo', or intermediate state, between dying and rebirth.
Text Messages from the Universe
