Gathering Around Audiovisuals
New Alterations is a workshop and collaborative space for emerging filmmakers.
Our second edition of New Alterations brought together new faces from across disciplines, glasses of house pinot grigio in hand, gathering around audiovisuals that turned to movement, activism, and Toni Morrison’s Sula. The evening opened with Nuotama Bodomo’s Boneshaker (2012), which places a nomadic family at its centre. Told through the eyes of a young girl born into a life of endless journeying, the family, dressed in their Sunday best, search for spiritual awakening. The blessings of Jesus Christ rise in chorus with words spoken in tongues, the ale-sheh-ku-bakoos swelling to a crescendo as olive oil from the Virgin Mary touches their foreheads. This surreal vision, perhaps echoing Nuotama’s childhood, has the quality of a coming-of-age tale, as though revelation is imminent. Instead, it leaves us in a space of uncertainty, with more questions opened than answered. The short film can be viewed on Nowness.
With the atmosphere set, we shifted to Lydia de Matos’ Sex Drive/Deathdrive (unreleased), shared through a password-protected Vimeo link. This dance film explores movement through sharp, minimal editing choices that insist on economy. A single spotlight transforms a bedroom into a stage, its corners becoming sites of disappearance and return. Our events create space for filmmakers to discuss their practice, and Lydia spoke about her performers moving with the intention of being edited. Their gestures were not confined to the language of dance alone, but entered into dialogue with the camera. Cuts track the body as it vanishes from the light, slips out of the frame, and exits through a darkened doorway that at moments resembles the edge of the screen itself. Shot in 4:3, the chosen ratio strengthens this illusion. The production spanned two days, one for choreography and one for filming, with post-production ongoing. Lydia also described her use of data-moshing, a process that disrupts digital files and distorts pixels, the technological equivalent of scratching celluloid. Here, Python was used to manipulate the data of the MP4 file, creating a raw digital texture.
The programme continued in Lafayette, Louisiana, guided by a voice in darkness. A southern accent, soulful and searching, draws us in as Aunt Bobbi recalls her love of reading, a hobby that planted the seeds of escape. Wessley Edmonds’ she knew me before i was born (2025) is a work of personal reflection, an homage to her mother’s late teacher. Aunt Bobbi’s words reveal a restlessness: she was never ‘happy living in Louisiana’. This longing sits in contrast to excerpts from Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), where naming, identity and intersectionality expose the weight of oppression on the Black community. Morrison’s misnaming of characters and her use of repurposed names demonstrate the power of identifiers in shaping autonomy. Edmonds pursues similar questions through film. The signifier of her name becomes a vessel for attachment, anchoring intimacy through distance. Aunt Bobbi dreams of leaving Louisiana, a desire that extends her autonomy beyond the self, even in the face of community resistance. The film withholds visual imagery for the first minute, a gesture of restraint. Once images appear, they show family photographs and domestic interiors, echoing Aunt Bobbi’s memories. Gradually, the focus shifts from the household to the wider world. Louisiana has long been home to some of the highest poverty rates among the Black community, and to ‘Cancer Alley’, an 85-mile corridor of petrochemical plants along the Mississippi River. Edmonds’ camera begins inside the home, then looks outward to reveal the systems that weigh on it, sketching the long struggle of the Black community against exclusion from White America.1
The evening closed with Great Okusun’s Incarcerated Roses (unreleased), which confronts the UK police system and its treatment of Free Palestine protestors. Composed as a rapid montage of mixed-media footage, moving from camera to phone, the film propels viewers into the immediacy of protest. Okusun, an emerging documentarian, spoke of the challenge in handling such emotionally charged material. Hours of raw footage had been cut down to a five-minute extract, an act of distillation that shaped fragments into coherence. After the screening, the audience reflected on the symbolism of house arrest imposed on one protestor, a gesture that collapses the distinction between private and public confinement. The film, still in its earliest stages, retains the roughness of unpolished rushes, yet its urgency and intent were unmistakable.
New Alterations remains committed to creating space for emerging filmmakers. At whatever stage a work finds itself, from raw footage to refined edit, we welcome it. With time, with conversation, and with a glass of wine, we aim to support the practice of filmmaking. Cinema is consciousness, and we strive to be conscious viewers of it.
P.47. Naming, Identity and Intersectionality
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