NEW SHORT FILM: SEE ME: A WALK THROUGH LONDON'S GAY (UN)SEEN (2020)

 

'a very original way to document lockdown … a very personal film. The mixed media works very well. I dread to think how long it took for you to splice in the music from your comps!’ 

Ben Bowles, Margate Bookie Film Festival

The title of this film is a play on words: seen/scene, unseen/unscene. 

This film is made using digital transfer versions of c90 tape compilations I made between 1992-1995, juxtaposed with moving image footage of me in 2018 and 2020 and a typeface font graphic ‘See Me’ that I designed in 2005. The c90 cassette on screen is the cassette compilation that I still have from 1994. 

This film includes sections of a walk that I made through Soho, London in the Summer of 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. As I walk, I listen on headphones to the compilation music tapes that I made when I first came to this area as a teenager in the 1990s. 

As I walk down the streets that were so important in shaping my life as a young gay man living in London, I revisit the gay bars and pubs that have been my safe spaces for the last twenty years and more. In this ‘new normal’ - what spaces are now open for queer people to perform their visibility and what’s the future of those spaces that I discovered on my walk that are currently closed? Will certain closed spaces now mean that for some queer people, they will become invisible/unseen as their safe spaces have gone?

The film begins with me walking down Oxford Street to Poland Street to The Kings Arms where I first discovered that bears and cubs don’t just live in the forest.