Starts:
06:45pm, Monday, 20 March 2017
Until:
08:45pm, Monday, 20 March 2017
Venue
Cinema 2
Barbican, Beech Street, London EC2Y 8AE
Tickets
Standard:
£11.50
AF Members:
£7.50 (Please contact AF for promotional discount code)
Concessions:
£10.50
Young Barbican:
£5
Tel (9am-8pm):
+44 (0)20 7638 8891
We are delighted that director Theo Anthony will join us at the screening for a Q&A following the UK premiere of Rat Film.
Rat Film
Baltimore becomes a stage set and laboratory for both rodent and human populations alike in Rat Film – an acerbic, seductive and hugely inventive documentary that explodes the American city’s ‘rat problem’ into a powerful and poetic portrait of urban, social and racial inequalities.
Winning comparisons to Harun Farocki, Werner Herzog and Chris Marker upon its premier at Locarno International Film Festival, for his first feature Theo Anthony draws upon his experience in music videos, digital culture and photojournalism to create a singular cinematic language of his own. Combining elements including academic research, tender encounters with eccentric characters, Google Maps hacks, a Dan Deacon soundtrack, the tactics of rat hunters and the architectural adaptations of rat keepers, Rat Film tells a devastating tale of a city’s means of keeping its ‘undesirable’ elements in order.
A unique blend of poetic intrigue and scholarly precision… A movie that brilliantly defies categorization. Anthony’s feature-length debut careens from scientific observation and historical overview to spiritual inquiry with a freewheeling approach that never ceases to surprise, even as it maintains a cogent thesis. Both a chronicle of the rat infestation plaguing the city of Baltimore and a broader assessment of the class problems plaguing its development, “Rat Film” manages to say something real and immediate in a fresh and inventive voice.
- Eric Kohn, Indiewire
Guided by the dual narrators of a disembodied, Siri-like, scholarly voice, and Edmund, a philosophical pest control worker, Anthony’s debut feature weaves an audio-visual tapestry that reveals that the traps the city lays are not just for its rats, but for its residents too
USA, 2016, Theo Anthony, 82 mins
+
Peace in The Absence of War
A portrait of a confused city in pain. A tone-poem for a Baltimore at the juncture of unrest and healing, as the city responds to the aftermath of the death of Freddie Gray, a Black American Baltimore native who died in police custody.
USA, 2015, Theo Anthony, 5 mins