A Moon For My Father (2019)

★★★★★

“A completely unique and revelatory piece of film-making”

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

Douglas White collaborates with Iranian filmmaker Mania Akbari to coin a tender fusion of langauge, where a meeting of cinema and sculpture investigates the processes of physical and psychological destruction and renewal. Begun just weeks after first meeting, the film charts a deepening artistic and personal relationship exploring the nature of skin, family, death, water, desire and, throughout, a powerful will to form.

The film takes an epistolary form, drawing on several years of written correspondence between Akbari and White. Deftly interwoven alongside the letters are family photos, archival footage from Iran, imagery from White’s artwork, and scenes of the couple’s everyday life together. As Akbari undergoes surgeries on a body decimated by cancer, remembrance and reconstruction provide a framework for investigating how bodies are traumatised, censored and politicised, and yet ultimately remain a site of possibility.

Lubion (2019)

Lubion delves into a hallucinatory landscape, journeying through a shifting psychological and corporeal terrain borne of the powerful effects of the eponymous IVF hormone treatment undertaken by Mania. As the drug is delivered by injection, reality mixes with a chimeric techno-natural vision of inner and outer worlds. The film layers intimate home footage with vibrant CG renderings of medical imagery, veering between the personal and the clinical.

Available on Mattflix

Lubion was originally commissioned by Modern Forms and is distributed by Cryptofiction