Last weekend I paid a visit to the rather gorgeous Dalston Rio Cinema, to watch It Always Rains On Sunday, which was showing as part of the East End Film Festival. It was one of their ‘Silver Screen’ matinees, which are free for the over 60s and include tea and cake in the ticket price. And let me tell you, the home-made victoria sponge was DELICIOUS, and not just because it was free.

Rio Cinema is very lovely inside, with a huge pale blue arching ceiling and a proper thick red velvet curtain across the screen. It has been a cinema for nearly a century, and there’s a detailed history page on their site, including pictures of it in some of its former incarnations, as the Kingsland Empire, the Dalston Classic, and the racy Tatler.

The film was ostensibly about a Bethnal Green housewife sheltering her escaped convict ex-lover, but actually the star of the film was Ealing Studios version of East London in the 1940s (including the line “Oh, I wish there was no such place as Bethnal Green!” which got a big laugh). There was a lot of detail about the daily life of the family, with their tin bath and their Anderson shelter and cheese ration. Plus a trio of Cockney crooks, a Jewish market wheeler-dealer and a philandering saxophonist. My favourite bit, however, was the switch to a film of a toy train set for the long-view action shot when the fugitive is escaping across a railway yard

The only thing that slightly spoiled it was the commentary coming from some of the more elderly members of the audience, along the lines of: “Ooh, what’s this? He knows, he knows! Ah, blackmail yes. Yes. Oh no, don’t run! He’s coming home!” etc… But hey, I was crashing their performance, so I can’t complain.

The protagonist, a young woman called Fausta,  is ill with a disease contracted from her mother’s breast milk known as “the milk of sorrow”,  a condition that only affects those women in Peru who were abused or raped during the years of terrorist struggle.  This Grauniad review says “This Peruvian lament examining how distress passes down the generations is subtle and wonderfully moving.”

Here’s the trailer. Please go and support the screening of weird films at Stratford Picturehouse!*

* ‘Weird’ is intended to be entirely complimentary, btw

There were some really stunning pieces, beautiful and mesmerising, some were creepy, or witty, all intelligent. It was packed when we went, and the abundant duct tape, neon, chatter and clanking of machinery gave the impression of being jostled through some kind of intergalactic souk.

Given the subject matter and the crowd you might expect the show to attract, *everyone* was taking photographs, liveblogging, podcasting, or filming the artworks, so there’s lots for people who didn’t get to see it, this video by Rainycatz takes in a lot of the really eerie lovely stuff that was going on.

There’s also a ton of Kinetica pictures on Flickr which are well worth a browse. Here’s a short video I took on my phone of some serenely spinning solar-powered glassy blue discs, which made me think of an otherwordly orrery: Kinetica – Orrery

I will add the title of that piece and the artist when I can get their website to work – it is clearly not futuristic enough to handle my OS + browser combo (oh snap!) Ok, have tracked it down, it’s called ‘Multiple Organism’ by Daniel Chadwick.

Other favourites include ‘Tease’ by Kathy Taylor, which has really grown on me. It has more layers than might be apparent at first glance, and it’s gentle play with a political/social theme appealed to me. As well as the ‘oooh flying teabag!’ reaction, of course.  You can see the movement in the video above.

The Most Unsettling Work award goes to ‘Memory’ by Mital and Papadakis, which was eerie in the extreme. Plus I’m a sucker for neurological imagery in art from Keats onwards. From ‘Ode to Psyche’:

In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branchèd thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind

Wow, I am the culturedest!

Western genre motifs are transformed to the landscape of East London. Questioning and re-imagining the Western’s portrayal of the ‘Vanishing Frontier’, this film recreates the epic panoramas of the Western in Hackney Marshes, the Thames Gateway and Essex. Using landfills, wastelands and gravel pits linked to the construction of the 2012 Olympic Park, it questions volatile financial speculations, private interests and the spectre of the Olympic gold rush. Working with a large cast of actors and non-actors (many of whom are themselves residents of East London), the film explores the compromises of a population facing this new order.

Trail of the Spider Poster