Loose Screw is a brand-new mini festival of short films exploring themes of mental health/illness. The festival has been developed and produced by disabled artist alabamathirteen, who will also be creating a new short film for the festival.
Screening alongside alabamathirteen are Joanna Byrne, Joseph June Bond and Rhian Cooke who have been commissioned to create new work about mental health/illness to show at the festival, following an open call out for responses from artists working in film/moving image.
Loose Screw has also been asking the Wakefield public to get involved in the film festival by submitting images, poems, short pieces of writing, and sounds about their experiences of mental health/illness through the hashtag #WhatSupWakefield. A selection of the submissions will be included in short indents shown between the films.
The film festival will open on the 30th November 2022, 17:00-21:00 as part of Artwalk Wakefield, until Sunday 4th December. Daily opening times are Thursday-Saturday 10:00-16:00 and Sunday 11:00-15:00. The screening will take place at The Art House.
The films, including the #WhatSupWakefield indents, will also be available to view online on the Loose Screw website from 30 November for those who are unable to attend the screening in person.
Access Information
Any film including speech will be captioned. Braille transcripts and audio descriptions will also be available at the screening. Transcripts and audio description will also be available on the website.
The building and the screening room at The Art House are wheelchair accessible. There will be a variety of seating available in the screening room. The screening room will have low light levels, and notices will be displayed outside the screening room detailing any flashing or strobe lighting in the films, as well as any other content warnings. Click here for The Art House’s full accessibility information.
There will be information available signposting to a number of local mental health organisations.
As one of our artists is immunocompromised we politely request the audience wear a face mask if they are able to and ask that you do not attend the screening in person if you are feeling unwell.
Loose Screw Film Festival is funded by a Culture Grant from Wakefield Council, and kindly supported by The Art House, Artwalk Wakefield and Pavilion.
Commissioned Artists Bios
Joanna Byrne
Joanna Byrne is an artist-filmmaker and writer based in Leeds/Bradford. She works with super8 and 16mm film in a tactile, material way – incorporating found footage, hand-manipulation and physical traces of her body into her work. She performs with live projections and sound to create immersive expanded cinema experiences.
Byrne is interested in historical and contemporary cinemas and the stories they tell about femininity and sexuality. Her films and performances often explore entanglements of being and looking in the female experience of cinema and visual culture. Recently she has begun considering the possibilities of a female bi+ gaze in film.
She has a socially-engaged practice and collaboration with other people is important. Byrne is interested in how experimental, participatory film practices can be therapeutic and transformational: connecting us as individuals to each other, but also to shared communities, histories and stories, the wider world and even Planet Earth.
For Loose Screw, Byrne will create a 16mm ‘moving meditation’ on therapeutic healing, exploring the integration of different aspects of the Self through a practice of re-connecting with nature.
Joseph June Bond
Joseph June Bond is a multidisciplinary artist, community organiser and sports coach. Their practice nurtures intergenerational knowledge sharing and collaboration through practical workshops, sports methodologies and open source resources. Joseph’s recent work exploring fluid bodies, bodies of fluid and bodily fluids as porous repositories of queer ritual, movement and sound have been shared at ICA (London), Collective (Edinburgh), Site Gallery (Sheffield) and Futura (Prague). Parallel to their practice, Joseph facilitates inclusive communities – prioritising women, non-binary and trans people – for all bodies and abilities to play basketball.
Rhian Cooke
Rhian is an artist based in Leeds who works across sculpture, installation and moving image, exploring sonic worlds and headspaces using handmade and digital processes. She tells on-going stories about nature and the environment.
In her current practice she is interested in how she can explore connections through her own and imagined environment using her own ongoing collections of stop motion animations, video and audio recordings. She also likes to explore different modes of communication through lights, motion and textures in her surroundings. She brings these ideas together and experiment how she can create movements through space in film.