Announcing: Cinema Year Zero x Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend
Cinema Year Zero are very happy to announce that we have produced the print programme for the Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend’s 2nd edition, taking place July 4th-6th at the Rio Cinema in Dalston. More information and tickets can be found here (earlybird passes available until Sunday at midnight).
This year’s festival has a focus on ‘personal documentary’. In an era of Netflix talking heads and glorified Wikipedia summaries, this sub-genre is often overlooked—and unfairly so. The 8 film programme at CNFW highlights personality-driven work that pulls questions of ethics into direct conflict with the possibilities of filmmaking technology, giving audiences a chance to encounter ground-breaking documentary work up close.
For the print programme, designed by Festival Co-Director Kimia Ipakchi, we have commissioned writing on each film being screened with extracts available to read below. Accompanying the essays will be more detail on each film and the festival, a programmers note, and a history of the personal documentary in 10 films, featuring writing on Jonas Mekas, Martha Coolidge, Nathan Fielder, and many more, compiled and written by Ben Flanagan, Blaise Radley, Kirsty Asher, Sam Moore, Owen Vince, Kat Haylett, Tom de Lancy Green, Alonso Aguilar, Joseph Owen, Anna Devereux, and Orla Smith.
The festival directors Kimia Ipakchi & Orla Smith had this to say about the event:
"CNFW is intended as a collective, communal event to shake up the way you think about documentary film. We've curated a festival where films and audiences speak to one another, building a thrilling, varied, and rich picture of personal nonfiction filmmaking that exemplifies everything documentary can and should be. See you at the Rio!"
Burden of Other People’s Dreams Created by Joe Bini
Interview by Orla Smith
I laugh when Joe casually refers to his twenty year editor-director relationship with Werner Herzog as ‘a long internship’, but it’s also what makes his approach to artmaking a balm. Perhaps you’d think that a career should start with DIY experiments and end with making Grizzly Man (2005), but in this case it happened more or less the other way around. I suggest that many people would think this niche, difficult to finance (we’ll do our best) personal project is a step back career-wise—but it’s a provocative point rather than a question I actually need the answer to. To be honest, the relief I feel from realising that filmmaking and capitalism can exist separate from each other is immense. ‘I’ve always had this dream of being able to do film like a painter or writer does, where there’s nothing between you and doing it,’ he shares.
Chronically Online: A Personal History of the UK Internet + Panel discussion with online creators
Article by Ola Smith and the programmers
Because of the accessibility of phone cameras and the immediate distribution system of the internet, almost anybody can be an ‘online video creator’, and it’s fostered a different kind of moving image language that all poor ‘chronically online’ souls are fluent in. It’s different from traditional cinema, but I’d argue that these videos are still ‘cinema’ of a different kind—but the experiment of presenting them in a movie theatre is a provocation to you, to decide whether you believe that to be true.
MS Slavic 7 + Short film Point and Line to Plane Dir. Sofia Bohdanowicz (with Deragh Campbell)
Essay by Emily Jisoo Bowles
As a recurring character in co-directors Campbell and Bohdanowicz’s collaborations, Audrey is an amalgamation of their creative sensibilities, her iterative selves probing their relationship to their own art as well as that of others. The film’s title refers to the library call number of the letters, situating them as archival objects mired in institutional red tape, an impersonal and arbitrary categorisation that stands in sharp contrast to the great affection and intensity of emotion contained within. ‘There’s something kind of horrifyingly raw... about seeing the actual physical objects,’ says Audrey, and there’s a rawness too in how she tries to articulate her feelings about them in semi-improvised monologues punctuated by long pauses and cracks in voice. She analyses the letters, drawing on theory and art references but never quite reaching a stable conclusion, sometimes straying further and further away from their actual content. In their short film Point and Line to Plane, Audrey grieves her friend through their shared love of Kandinsky, locating the mole on his nose in the painter’s circles. She is the intrepid researcher who seeks meaning in everything, grasping towards her own subjective truths to the point of hallucinating in front of a painting.
Kings & Extras: Digging for a Palestinian Image Azza El-Hassan, 2004
Essay by Arta Barzanji
What follows is a multi-layered journey through geography and memory. El-Hassan’s search for the lost archives—once housed by the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s Film Unit—takes her across cities and conversations. She speaks with people in the streets and offices, as well as with artists, activists, and officials. 'There’s a missing archive. Where do you think it could be?' she asks repeatedly. To some, her mission seems quixotic. 'You will never find them. My colleagues and I looked for them for years and couldn’t find them. You’ve started looking decades after the fact. What makes you think you could do it?' To others, it seems distasteful: 'Now is not the time for cinema. If you want drama, go to the border and see how people are being treated.'
Essay by Ben Flanagan
The film begins with the camcorder-captured image of a slender figure tying their hair back and walking through a field, while oversaturated Godardian colours waft across the screen. This sequence will recur; every time it conveys something different to the viewer, with its final iteration bearing the cumulative weight of each that came before it. En route, listen out as the entire film is narrated in a flat, British monotone—you’d be forgiven for thinking it might be AI, but it’s an actor listed as Philippa James. This voiceover begins telling the mystery of the filmmaker—who is Julian Castronovo beyond the disconnected images he shows us: Vape pen, iPhone case, and then matchsticks and diaries? And why would he be the subject of his own film?
Shared Resources + Q&A with Jordan Lord Jordan Lord, 2021
Essay by Tom de Lancy Green
Much as it might for the visually impaired, the opening domestic scene plays out aurally. Already: strife. Lord’s mother mentions ‘Columbus Day’; their sister interjects: ‘National Indigenous People’s Day’. National identity is a matter of perspective. So is frailty, apparently. An early scene, revisited many times throughout Shared Resources, has Lord and their parents discussing a rough cut of this very film. Albert thinks the worst of his potential observers, almost as poorly as he thinks of himself as filmed by his own child. He insists that in the footage the audience is seeing, he looks frail. With considerably more import, he worries further that his filmic self will be a metonym for the Real Albert, an otherwise vigorous and esteemed servant of Gulfport, Mississippi, his family, and God above.
The Taste of Mango + Q&A with Chloe Abrahams, moderated by Saeed Taji Farouky
Essay by Kirsty Asher
Chloe Abrahams’s mother appears to the audience first in gauzy haze; uncertain, in extreme close up. Then, her eyes lock onto the camera with a hard gaze that softens, the smile out of frame but implied. While the footage runs, Abrahams’s voice describes how her mother has passed down foodways learned from her own mother on the proper way to eat a mango, which gives this film its title. From the beginning, this touching anecdote of food lore introduces the link between these three women of Sri Lankan heritage, two of whom now live in the UK, of shared knowledge passed through generations, which will open their familial bonds up to the audience in more complicated and painful ways.
All These Summers + Q&A with Therese Henningsen Therese Henningsen, 2025
Essay by Blaise Radley
All These Summers opens on a city scene recognisable to anyone who’s been out late in London on the weekend (especially in the post-pandemic era)—a surprisingly high number of cars and a dispiritingly low number of people, the swallowing quiet only occasionally interjected upon by the mew of a tabby cat or the bristling movements of a city fox. Guiding us through this early morning metropolitan safari is Povl Christian Henningsen, a well-humoured ageing Danish man who offers musings on the rather tepid nightlife of Seven Sisters as he attempts to engage passersby in dialogue. Lurking by a bus stop, he has the air of a lion lying in wait near a watering hole, but getting more than a polite “Morning!” is nigh impossible.