Miranda Pennell

Film and video synopsies

Why Colonel Bunny Was Killed 
2010 / 28 minutes / b&w

Triggered by the memoirs of a medical missionary on the Afghan Borderlands, the film is constructed from still photographs of colonial life on the North-West  frontier of British India at the turn of the 20th century. Searching for clues to the realities behind images framed at a time of colonial conflict, the film plays sound against image to find contemporary parallels in Western portrayals of a distant place and people.

Drum Room  
2007 / 15 minutes / colour

The empty spaces of an ambiguous building open-up to reveal a group of aspiring musicians as they play together, alone.   

You made me love you  
2005 / 4 minutes / colour  
 
Twenty-one dancers play a game of cat and mouse with an unpredictable camera.  Disoriented, the viewer is fixed by the gaze of dancers who crowd the frame.

Fisticuffs  
2004 / 11 minutes / colour  

A bloke walks into a pub...
Six actors punch, kick and wrestle their way through the Wild West of an East London drinking establishment. The ritual of the Western bar-brawl, is re-located to a London working mens' club. The violence appears to have no consequences, the actors' bodies being as rubbery and invulnerable as those in the TV Westerns that inspired the film.

Magnetic North  
2003 / 9 minutes / colour

Adolescent rituals are played out across the wintry landscapes of small-town Finland.  A teenage girl skates on a frozen lake, while a teenage boy poses with a guitar in his room. The film evokes a world of adolescent fantasy and yearning.

Human Radio   
2002 / 9 minutes / b & w   

People dance in private moments of personal abandon across London in the summer of 2001.
The film is the result of the director’s work with the first ten respondents to a local newspaper advertisement that she placed seeking ‘living-room dancers’ - people who love to dance behind closed doors.