kangaroo Archives - Jeremy C. Processing

Director – Ed Sayers – 2025 – UK – Cert. PG – 82m

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The process of shooting the natural world on the Super 8 amateur home movie format of the 1970s brings a participating community of people closer to nature – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 4th

This starts and ends with the image zooming in to and zooming out from Super 8 footage. The Kodak Super 8 system was the premier format for home movies in the late1960s through the 1970s before it was replaced for the most part by videotape in the 1980s.

For some years, Ed Sayers was involved in a Super 8 film competition wherein punters would enter their films, and most of the material was much the same – family memories or holiday footage. Some of it extremely wild. As he puts it, the medium “painted our memories on film.”

One year, a very different submission turned up from a Frenchman named Roger. Roger had shot footage of flamingoes.

The nature of Super 8 was that the film came on little cartridges of reversal film inserted into the camera. In terms of footage, the cartridges didn’t run that long. You’d shoot by squeezing the trigger, which would stop filming when released. … Read the rest

My Extinction

Director – Josh Appignanesi – 2022 – UK – Cert. 15 – 80m

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In which director Appignanesi chronicles both his unease at the climate crisis and what happens when he joins Extinction Rebellion to do something about it – world premiere on Thursday, June 29th at the Curzon Mayfair, out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 30th

As well as making small British narrative features (Female Human Animal, 2018; The Infidel, 2010), Aappignasi makes little diary films about his life. The previous two, in which his wife, the author and academic Devorah Baum, is credited as co-director, chart impending parenthood (The New Man, 2016) and their relationship (Husband, 2022). This third entry sees Josh hit a professional lull after a planned feature film falls apart and he wonders if his career as a film maker is over. Actually, he reiterates variants of this question at various points throughout the film.

At the same time, environmental activists Extinction Rebellion (XR) are on the TV news for bringing parts of London to a standstill. Cue a title sequence montage of collapsing ice shelf, burning tar sands, gridlocked London traffic, industrial pollution, a bewildered kangaroo with outback ablaze behind it, a flooded street with parked cars, a polar bear stranded on an ice floe, the UK government declaring a climate emergency in response to XR and Greta Thunberg’s “I want you to… act as if your house was on fire” speech.… Read the rest