The Republics
Event WebsiteThe Republics will be screening in our black box projection space from 8 June – 10 July. Screenings begin at 11am, 12.30pm, 2pm and 3.30pm (running time 83 minutes).
Free Admission, all welcome.
Poet, translator and activist Stephen Watts’s book-length prose poem Republic of Dogs / Republic of Birds explores landscape, history, memory and the power of words to celebrate and resist.
Filmmaker Huw Wahl has translated Watts’s poem into a luminously beautiful 16mm documentary essay, which accompanies Stephen Watts as he moves from North Uist in Scotland’s Western Isles to London’s Isle of Dogs to the mountains of Northern Italy.
Shot in black and white, using a Bolex ‘wind-up’ camera, and developed by hand in Huw Wahl’s basement, the film has a visceral quality that captures the relationship between language and landscape at the heart of Watts’s work.
Gareth Evans, Moving Image Curator at the Whitechapel Gallery, describes The Republics as ‘one of the most impressive artists’ films of recent years, whose own poetry speaks as honestly and eloquently as that of the writer it portrays’.
