Join us for the screening of Huw Wahl’s 2020 essay-film, The Republics
[ID: B+W photo, taken from above, of an open book in someone’s hands. The printed text on the pages is surrounded by hand-written annotations and scribbles.]
Doors: 7pm
Tickets: £7 - £15
This event is part of the Raft Festival programme (see the main festival page on our website for full listings).
One-off tickets are available for every Raft event on a sliding scale basis. We encourage you to consider purchasing a ‘festival pass’ bundle ticket which will allow you, at a reduced rate, to access a given number of events across the full programme (either 5 events, 10 events, or all 30 events). See the link below for more details about these options!
The Republics is a b&w 16mm artists' essay film, drawn from Stephen Watts’s 2016 book Republic Of Dogs/Republic Of Birds (Test Centre Press), exploring landscape, history, memory and the power of words to celebrate and resist.
“For four decades, poet, translator and activist Stephen Watts has been the quietly urgent, profoundly committed voice of the marginalised and the overlooked… Now he has found his collaborative equal in the engaged 16mm filmmaker Huw Wahl, who has translated the text of Watt’s book-length prose poem Republic Of Dogs / Republic Of Birds into a luminous feature-length documentary essay of remarkable beauty and spirited attention. The Republics moves from the early 1980s to the present, and from London’s Isle of Dogs and Scotland’s Western Isles - where Watts lived and worked as a shepherd in his youth - to the mountains of Northern Italy: at once a topographic journey and a highly personal meditation on history, memory, identity and belonging.
- Gareth Evans, Moving Image Curator, Whitechapel Gallery
Trailer for ‘The Republics’