Susannah Gent's film 'Unhomely Street' selected to premiere at the 63rd International Short Film Festival Oberhausen
Monday 06 February 2017
Unhomely Street follows a female protagonist in a state of fugue following a head injury as she wanders an alienating city underbelly of clubs and free parties. Through recollections of anti-capitalist conversations, historical information about wartime atrocity, and human brutality, she searches for hope in an increasingly frightening, subjective landscape.
The film explores the Derridean concept of hauntology both in terms of its original context taken from Spectres of Marx, where Derrida suggests that ‘time is out of joint’ and that we are haunted by spectres of those dead and those not yet born, as well as recognising Mark Fisher's interpretation that mourns the lost futures of the twentieth century, suggesting we live in a time of mental illness, unable to envisage a future that is different to current times.
Unhomely Street is a deeply personal film that aims to employ new approaches to filmmaking through multiple narrative strands and a focus on tone and metaphor in an attempt to communicate a subjective experience.
Susannah Gent is a filmmaker and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media Arts and Communication at Sheffield Hallam University.