A Mountain That Opens Like a Door and Closes Like a Mountain, 2017 10:00
Screenings:
Images Festival,
Toronto, Canada
2017
Awards:
Trinity Square Video Award, Images Festival, 2017
A Mountain That Opens Like a Door and Closes Like a Mountain navigates a landscape of perforations. Falling into and emerging out of holes, the film collapses the long history of the Cornish and Welsh landscapes as sites of mourning and resistance and what it means to encounter these fragments as a visitor to its landscape and archives. The film blends original footage of abandoned mines and neolithic burial sites in the Penwith Peninsula with images and miners ballads from Philip Donnellan's 1961 film The Big Hewer based on the radio play by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger which bears witness to the lives and conditions of miners in the Northumberland, Durham, South Wales and East Midlands coalfields in the 1960s.