Losing the Plot #12
Losing The Plot #12 took place Friday 05-Sunday 07 June 2026. Star & Shadow Cinema's annual film retreat returns to create a shared space for community and alternative cinema in the wilderness of the North Pennines.
Friday 05 June
6.30pm: Dinner
8pm: Desire Lines (Dir. Dane Komljen):
Branko dwells on the fringes of Belgrade society. Unable to sleep and isolated, he speaks to no one. His only obsession seems to be his younger brother, whose muddy shoes, bloodstained sheets, and murky whereabouts unsettle him. Making his way through passageways, park bushes and brutalist landscape, Branko shadows his brother’s every step, haunted by his strange behavior. As the paranoia sets in, Branko realizes his brother isn't the strange one. He is.
Discussions around the Fire
Saturday 06 June
8am: Breakfast
11am: Nossa Senhora da Loja do Chinês (Dir. Ery Claver):
When a Chinese merchant brings to a neighborhood of Luanda a peculiar holy plastic figure of Our Lady, a mourning mother will seek peace, a committed barber starts a new cult and a stray kid will look for revenge for his lost friend. This bizarre urban tale will reveal a family and city facade full of resentment, greed and torment. Our Lady of the Chinese Shop was filmed entirely in Luanda, Angola's complex capital city, with many layers, various timelines, and infinite ways of living. So is the film, which presents different looks at the same object. A film in which a large arena matters as much as the hallway of the house, faith and power meet, the silence of conversation joins the anguished sound of water, the heat of the sun connects to neon light, and a poet who writes in Mandarin.
1pm: Lunch
4pm: While the Gods Were Busy with Another Child (Dir. Andrea Luka Zimmerman:
This deeply exploratory work is drawn exclusively from the eclectic personal and public archive, in multiple formats, of Andrea’s life until their lasting estrangement from both parents, aged 30. Alternating between the playful, poetic and unsettling, While the Gods… collages together photographs, 16mm, VHS, interviews and diary entries in a process of profound and necessary self – and social interrogation.Unflinching in its presentation and analysis of a precarious and challenging working-class childhood and adolescence in 1970s Munich, nevertheless While the Gods… manifests an enduring and wayward spirit of resistance, seeding the possibility of living a life on one’s own terms.
4.30pm: All These Summers (Dir. Therese Henningsen):
Driven by a recurring urge to encounter strangers with her camera, the filmmaker begins to film her solitary Greek Cypriot neighbour Pete in the tower block in North London where they both live. Around the same time, her father in Denmark receives a cancer diagnosis requiring her to spend more time with him. As her father gradually slips back into the depression that made him absent when she was a teenager, she feels a need to document this transition. Her compulsion to enter into Pete’s life and to film him echoes with her desire for understanding her father’s experience of isolation and loneliness, as well as her own relationship to it.
+ conversation with filmmakers
6.30pm: Dinner
7.30pm: We are Making a Film About Mark Fisher (Dir. Close & Remote):
We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher is a 65-minute cinematic experiment exploring the continuing relevance of the late theorist’s ideas on capitalism, culture, and the future.Directed by Simon Poulter and Sophie Mellor (collaborating as Close and Remote) the film was made in 2024-2025 using Instagram (@markfisherfilm) as a methodological tool to find collaborators, generate research and disseminate content. With over 70 invited contributors listed the film blends documentary, performance, new music, and hauntological fiction. The main narrative follows Parkins – a time-slipped character – through ghostly landscapes and digital spaces, tracing Fisher’s thoughts from the 1990s to our algorithmic present. A second narrative emerges from interviews conducted with theorists, journalists, and artists whose life and work have been influenced by him. The film embodies Fisher’s call for collective imagination beyond capitalist realism. It ends in the room with a discussion about agency and what we can do next.
9.30pm: Magic City (Dir Guillaume Maupin & Pablo Guarise):
On May 22, 1914, Herman Poole Blount arrived on Earth in Birmingham, Alabama, known as The Magic City, a segregated industrial town in the rural South. After leaving for Chicago at the age of 32, he would become Sun Ra, one of the most eccentric and prolific jazz musicians of this century, as well as the founder of a strange cosmic philosophy.A portrait of the artist as a young man as well as one of a city through time, The Magic City tells the story of Sun Ra’s relation to this city-universe that is at once political and magical, familiar and fantastic, disturbing and fascinating.
Discussions around the Fire
Sunday 07 June
8am: Breakfast
10.30am: Redoubt (Dir. John Skoog):
At the peak of the Cold War, farm worker Karl-Göran Persson starts fortifying his house. He gathers scrap-metal and casts it into the walls to build a fortress meant to protect him and his neighbors. His efforts are met with puzzlement by everyone but the children. As the construction progresses, so does a conflict with the people in the village.
2pm: Collective Monologue (Dir. Jessica Sarah Rinland):
Intimate and fragmented moments unfold in a community of zoos and animal rescue centers across Argentina. As histories of these institutions are uncovered, dedicated workers commit both day and night to caring for the remaining enclosed animals, fostering a mutual bond that transcends imagined boundaries between human and animal.
