We are delighted to announce three new articles in our rolling Volume 16.1 of Screenworks. In A Beautiful Day in the Tree of Life, Elsie Walker explores the resonances between The Tree of Life (2011) and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), drawing on Daniel Frampton’s film-philosophical framework to consider how films “think” and communicate. It examines how these works reshape consciousness as they appear to speak to one another within the filmmaker’s mind. This interfilmic dialogue is deeply inflected by memories of her late father, through which the films’ affective and philosophical dimensions are refracted and re-experienced.

Sesan Omotosho's The Role of a Filmmaker in Sustaining Cultural Development in Contemporary Nigerian Society: Tunde Kelani's Arugba examines Tunde Kelani’s Arugba as a case study for understanding the role of filmmakers in the cultural advancement of contemporary Nigerian society. Combining a 25-minute audiovisual study with a written thesis, it explores how Nollywood cinema preserves and reanimates Yoruba cultural history while engaging with questions of tradition, politics, and identity. Through close scene analysis, interviews with Kelani, and the application of creative practice and entertainment-education theories, the project foregrounds film’s capacity to communicate cultural values, challenge reductive stereotypes, and shape public consciousness. In doing so, it positions Arugba as a vital site of cultural expression where heritage and modernity intersect, and where cinematic form becomes a vehicle for social reflection and change.

Yinze Li's Invisible Vortex: Visual Style Innovation in Eastern Minimalist Aesthetics is a fictional short film developed as a Master’s dissertation project at Queen’s University Belfast, grounded in Eastern minimalist aesthetic principles. The project investigates how classical concepts such as Liubai (the expressive use of emptiness or “blank-leaving”) can be translated into cinematic narrative through a restrained visual style. Emphasising slowness, duration, and vertical composition, the film constructs a contemplative viewing experience that resists the sensory overload of contemporary digital culture. Through this formal approach, it offers a subtle critique of social indifference in an accelerated, image-saturated age, positioning minimalism as both an aesthetic and ethical practice of attention.

In The Fenestral Essay Film, Anna Ulrikke Andersen explores how the architectural essay film, a subgenre of the essay film, is helpful to think about the historical and social aspects of architecture and spatial thinking (Haralambidou 2015). The Window and I (2015) is a filmic exploration of three sets of windows, an essayistic self-portrait that explores framing, mobility and self-reflection as a critical spatial practice, following the practice and work of architectural theorist Jane Rendell (2006), coining the term "fenestral essay film". 

Daryl Scott's Negotiating-Z: Videographic torpedoing and the art of videographic thinking is a richly observed and intellectually engaging docu‑video essay, this piece offers a compelling blend of critique and homage as it navigates Terrence Malick’s cinematic world. It thoughtfully merges documentary sensibilities with the evolving language of the video essay, crafting an inventive form of academic cinema that is both reflective and aesthetically driven. Through this hybrid approach, the work not only illuminates Malick’s artistry but also charts the author’s own methodological evolution within screen‑based research.

Yu-Lun Sung, Lennie Varvarides, Kazimir Bielecki's Visualising Neurodivergent Thought Processes utilizes the desktop documentary format. Conducted by a team of two neurodivergent artists and one neurotypical researcher, the authors argue that desktop documentary, interpreted through Mieke Bal's Image-Thinking framework, serves as a legitimate method for understanding 'thinking in pictures' and externalising cognitive traits, particularly foregrounding the affective and political dimensions of the artmaking process. The authors contend that the format effectively highlights neurodivergent cognition by displaying the raw, iterative nature of thought, including its nonlinear, repetitive, and associative characteristics. The study proposes ‘Honesty' as a key characteristic linked to the Neurodivergent (ND) Aesthetic, defined as a refusal to sanitise the thought process. This approach challenges normative storytelling and invites viewers to reflect on the political and affective dimensions of the screen. Ultimately, the work positions desktop subjectivity as an "honest choreography" that externalises internal cognitive processes.

Cassandra Tytler's Oops! is a video installation and single-screen work that examines how interruption functions as a political and ideological intervention in video art practice. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s theorisation of epic theatre and Soviet montage theory, the work employs abrupt cuts, spatial disjunction, and embodied spectatorship to expose ideological structures. Through a feminist and queer lens, Oops! disrupts fixed narratives, positioning interruption as a gestic action that critiques power relations in contemporary Australian domestic and social contexts. This practice-led research demonstrates how video art can intervene in hegemonic structures by unsettling spectatorship and reframing the politics of perception.

David H. Fleming's video essay Danse Macabre: Of the Dying and Death of Philosophers on Film explores cinematic representations of death through a film-philosophic lens. By poetically compos(i)ting imaging-imaginings of real philosophers’ deaths and dying acts into a Danse Macabre this video essay expressively ponders philosophy’s entanglements with, and conditional/continual rebirths through, different media forms. If philosophy’s age-old entanglement with death unravelled alongside modernity’s privatisation of dying, films featuring global philosophers appear to pick up this ancient ‘necromantic’ baton. 

Miguel Mesquita Duarte’s video essay Remediations: Specters in/of/around Godard extends Godardian videographic criticism by focusing specifically on his political documentary cinema. By positioning the videographic essay as a direct heir to the essay film, Remediations intersects the performative exploration of self and other with the critical activity of historical reflection through re-readings and transformations of images and words, offering a new way to experiment with Godardian conceptual imagery and videographic essayistic methodologies. Remediations illuminates the essayistic methodologies of Godard’s political documentary films and creatively extends them through the dramatization of an impossible encounter with Godard himself.

This volume of Screenworks is a rolling publication. Each rolling volume runs from September to July, with the editorial team taking a well-deserved break in August. To submit work please read our Submissions Guidelines and use our Online Submission Form. If you are interested in submitting your practice and want further advice, then please contact us on admin@screenworks.org.uk with “Submissions” in the subject line.