Sonic Pictures: realities/fictions | Sonics & Scenics

14:00–15:00, Auditorium 
Kitchen Conversation #2

Historian and theorist of sound, Gascia Ouzounian, invites sound designers Chu-Li Shewring and Katarzyna Szczerba into a conversation on the ways in which film frames and places are transformed through soundscapes that can bring them to life and merge with them in a symbiotic relationship evoking realities and/or elaborating fictions. The starting  point to this conversation is Chu-Li Shewring’s new installation Termites Speaking in Tongues, commissioned for the festival, making the Museum’s cinema tower resonate with a human and insect chorus. 

15:30–16:30, Cinema
Screening of films by Chu-Li Shewring & Adam Gutch, with intro

A screening of two films by Chu-Li Shewring & Adam Gutch: Working to Beat the Devil, 2014, 24 min; and Fawley, 2022, 25 min.

Working to Beat the Devil features an aging scientist troubled and confused by remembrances from his past, who toils night and day to (re)discover secrets to the creation of life. Conjuring up Shelley’s Frankenstein, the natural history films of Jean Painlevé, and speaking in the words of Darwin, the film instils a quiet yet powerful sense of wonder in rediscovering the wild shapes of nature. Working to Beat the Devil was nominated for Tiger Awards for Short Films at 2014 IFF Rotterdam. 

Weaving a multitude of voices, both human and non-human, Fawley explores the environs of the now demolished Fawley Power Station, a huge Brutalist structure that was built on the edge of the New Forest, UK, between 1964 and 1971. The first of its kind – oil fuelled and computer-controlled – it became a strange, brooding and controversial presence within an area of outstanding natural beauty. Fawley won Best International Short Film at Sheffield Doc-Fest in 2022. 

17:00–18:00, Cinema
Screening of films with sound design by Katarzyna Szczerba, with intro 

A screening of three short films with sound design by sound recordist and sound designer Katarzyna Szczerba: Object: Diving Below the Ice, dir. Paulina Skibińska, 2015, 15 min; Para w pokoju / Couple in a room smoking cigarettes, dir. Katarzyna Gondek, 2019, 11 min; and Wildtracks, dir. Andrzej Załęski, featuring acclaimed nature sound recordists Chris Watson and  Izabela Dłużyk, 2025, 35min. 

The film Object: Diving Below the Ice follows a diver exploring the frigid depths below the ice. The director, Paulina Skibińska, aimed to create a mesmerizing and immersive experience, allowing the audience to descend into the depths with the diver, where the world above the water disappears. Szczerba's sound design plays a crucial role in enhancing this immersive experience, capturing the disorientation and tension of the dive. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2015 and won the Cinesonika Best Soundtrack Award in 2016.

Para w pokoju / Couple in a room smoking cigarettes invites the audience into the home of an elderly couple, Jadzia and Wiesio, as they go about their daily lives punctuated by smoking. As they eat eggs, smoke, cook sausages, smoke, share each other’s company and smoke some more, Gondek’s lens captures their relationship with startling yet warm and somewhat endearing authenticity. 

Wildtracks documents the creation of a collaborative audio piece titled Białowieża by nature sound recordists Chris Watson and Izabela Dłużyk. Chris Watson, one of the world’s most acclaimed recordists, is known for his work with the BBC and David Attenborough. Izabela Dłużyk, sightless from birth, is known for her recordings made in Białowieża Forest, Europe’s last primaeval forest. Together, Chris and Izabela recorded in the forest in spring 2024 to create a new work, which is a sonic document of not only one of Poland’s most beautiful regions, but also, in recent years, the site of migrants’ deaths along the border between Belarus and the EU.

19:00–20:30, Cinema
Screening of  Preemptive Listening by Aura Satz, 2024, 89 min.

Aura Satz’s documentary is the latest iteration of the artist’s ongoing project on sirens. Filming in locations as varied as the Fukushima nuclear site in Japan and alert-system assembly lines in the US, Satz considers the siren as a cipher for contemporary ideas of emergency and preparedness. Preemptive Listening features original compositions from over twenty experimental musicians, including Elaine Mitchener, Laurie Spiegel, Sarah Davachi, Moor Mother, Raven Chacon, and Camille Norment.

21:00–22:00, Cinema: live music performance of po (e) sies by Una Lee with vocalists from the Sirens Chamber Choir conducted by Magdalena Gruziel

po (e) sies, 2024, 40 min, is a performance work on migration across time and space, with bilingual poetry (Korean & English), preserving a flower-garden as music inscribed in the air. The piece was nominated for the prestigious Ivor Novello Composers Award in 2024.

Reincarnating the Korean ancient poetry/song form of Hyangga (meaning 'home song'), po (e) sies questions ways to maintain a garden as an heirloom, and how poetry can migrate across time and space. The work takes the blossoming calendar from a faraway garden as a musical score, telling the story of an elderly woman who sings to her flowers in her garden about the ephemerality of everything and human desire to be remembered. Originally developed with the Landless ensemble, the piece has been reimagined for the festival with the singers from the Warsaw-based Sirens Chamber Choir.  

Una Lee is an artist working with sounds, stories and sensations, in perpetual pursuit of alternative storytelling. She plays with the notion of a contemporary marriage between performance and poetry. She likes to explore human condition, memory, time, and our relationship with art and ecology through narratives. These are often drawn from her autobiographical events as a non-native in her current habitat, while she can be identified as Korean-Irish-British within her practice. She has performed and exhibited extensively including at Sonorities Festival, Belfast; International Summer Music Festival Darmstadt; Nowy Teatr, Warsaw; Espace Niemeyer, Paris; Osaka Electroacoustic Music Festival; Dotolim, Seoul; and apex art, New York. She is an Oram Award winner and Ivor Novello Composers Award nominee, and holds an MA and PhD from Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast.

Chu-Li Shewring is a filmmaker, sound designer and sound artist. Her films combine interview, archival and documentary material with delicately crafted soundscapes to create realities that straddle fact and fiction. Her most recent film, Wendy, 2023, was made in collaboration with artist Frances Scott and commissioned by TACO!, London. Fawley, co-directed with Adam Gutch, won Best International Short Film at Sheffield DocFest, 2022, while Working to Beat the Devil was nominated for Best Short Film at International Film Festival Rotterdam, 2014. As a sound designer, she has collaborated with artist filmmakers including Anagram, Siobhan Davies, Jeremy Deller, Beatrice Gibson, Steve McQueen, Ben Rivers, Frances Scott, and Aura Satz. And for this contribution to the field of artist moving image she was awarded the Jules Wright Prize at the Jarman Award 2017.