Nails (John McCullagh) | Babelgum

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Nails (John McCullagh)

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Nails (John McCullagh)

[ 03:29 ]

A manicurist, member of a family of "boat people" immigrants, draws on memories of her rural childhood to transform her customers' nails into small scenes of a life. There are women in London's Brixton whose fingernails recall village life in Vietnam.

03:15

Love In The Streets (Jerry Rothwell)
Our collective imagination of homelessness is shaped by the idea of someone who is single and lonely. Roy and Morag explode that myth and take in companionship, humor and love, alongside the dirt, noise and damp of London’s pavements –a warm look at the chill of a (love) life lived on the outside.

03:22

I Love Brixton (Richard Guard)
From dawn to dusk in the heart of London's Brixton, with its immigrant populations and its market, chance encounters in the street and kisses exchanges on the sidewalk. Its vibrant urban life, and the faces that give it life, before the sun sets.

01:00

Attractive
How do we view beauty in today's society? A short experimental film about beauty.

03:12

Ms. Salmon (Valerie Shields)
"Grey Gardens" meets "The Cove"… Kooky British marine philanthropist, whose real name is Melanie Salmon, makes sea conservation more glamorous with London Fashion Week, movie-star Sharon Stone, and boxing-champ Chris Eubank. "Save the dolphins!"

00:47

Morgan Spurlock presents CINELAN 3-Minute Stories
Morgan Spurlock, one of the founders of CINELAN, invites you to discover great 3-minute documentaries from all around the world.

03:07

The Work's the Thing (Abigail Norris & Jerry Rothwell)
A short film about the art and working methods of Paul Housley. Born in Stalybridge, Greater Manchester, in 1964, Paul studied at the Royal College of Art. He has an interest in observing the everyday and a penchant for humble mass-produced objects. Like a number of other young UK artists, Paul is returning to figurative painting, at a time when video, photography, installation and new media have attracted increased attention as art forms. Since the popularity of the young British artists, the rise of 'Brit Art' and the controversy of the Turner Prize, painting has taken a back seat. Damien Hirst was famously quoted as saying that painting was dead. Housley, however works with traditional materials, proving that painting is alive and has an energy and power of its own in today’s art world. His paintings play with our notions of taste, finding novelty in cliché and lyricism in mundane, blank objects like sports bags and light bulbs.

03:08

Repelling the Viewer (Abigail Norris & Jerry Rothwell)
Johannes Phokela, as he explains, has always been fascinated by iconic images and how they have “infiltrated our lives.” So this very unusual painter takes those images from classic paintings of the European masters and twists and turns them into satires of contemporary life. It might be turning a muscular white man black as he drapes himself over a nude woman, or hanging a cigarette from the mouth of a female, or adding a clown nose here and there. Filmmaker Jerry Rothwell’s camera captures Phokela at work, putting words to the brush strokes that transform allegories from centuries past into notions that could be considered subversive, as an unsettling cello underlines notions that could be considered subversive. At least, Phokela hopes so.

03:16

Paints On Ceiling (Jeremiah Zagar)
Sometimes, an entire lifetime is decided in a moment. At least it was for Isaiah Zagar, whose mother’s scream when he was three set him on the road to becoming an artist. In this striking, dream-like film, his son, Jeremiah reenacts the incident when his father had his epiphany: Letting his crayon stray outside the lines in the coloring book, to the formica kitchen table, then the floor, up the refrigerator and finally scrambling to the top of that appliance in order to color on the ceiling. When his mother walked in and saw her son teetering on the edge, her terrified cry convinced him that his destiny was to evoke similar reactions from others to his art. Now a famous Philadelphia mosaic and mural artist, Isaiah Zagar’s exploration of this moment offers extraordinary insight into the mind of a fascinating and complex man, the subject of his son’s first full-length documentary that won the Emerging Visions Award at its debut at the 2008 South by Southwest film festival.

06:07

Hair We Are
Two school girls talk about their afro hair and the difference between their hair and there friends straight hair.

03:27

Paradise Regained (Steve James)
He was the painter who brought paradise to the infamous Chicago housing projects, miles of urban housing rife with violence, gangs and crime until they were finally torn down. With Reed's wall-filling murals, residents transformed their living rooms into oases from the ghetto storms outside. Through description and animation, Reed depicts a world that is thankfully gone yet brought alive again by ex-residents who will seek his views of paradise.

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