Nina Danino is one of the foremost British experimental filmmakers of her generation. Her films explore the relationship of image to sound, and of theory to practice. She draws upon her own personal history as well as literary and artistic works, which are filtered through a poetic interpretation of feminist theory that foregrounds women’s personal experience and expression. These inspirations are restructured through image-making, editing and voice performances to create original works of striking intensity and emotional force.

The first ten years of the groundbreaking London arts organisation ACME are explored through rarely seen archival film and new interviews.

‘Raban's bold new film continues his ongoing examination of London's stratified social geography by exploring a fertile, creative scene in which he played a significant part. Solely using archival visual materials, he revisits the first ten years of art organisation ACME, highlighting its work in housing artists in the East End and the extraordinary work that was produced. The powerful archival footage incorporates Stephen Cripps' pyrotechnic displays, an abrasive Anne Bean music performance and Stuart Brisley's politically charged action 'Ten Days'. Interviewees include: Cosey Fanni Tutti, Jock McFadyen and David Critchley. Raban reflects on the nature of 'evidence' while a very particular vision of creative activity emerges - one based on devoted experimentation, location specificity and process.’ (William Fowler, London Film Festival)

Part essay, part film poem, Magic Mirror translates the startling force of French surrealist Claude Cahun’s photographs into a choreographed series of tableaux vivants. Re-staging Cahun’s black and white images with selected extracts from her book Aveux Non Avenus (Confessions Untold), the film explores the links between Cahun’s photographs and writings. Cahun’s multi-subjectivity, as expressed in both her photographs and book, set the scene for the film, where she dresses and makes her face up in many different ways, swapping identities between gender, age and the inanimate. The splitting of identity appears as a double which persists throughout in image and voice; as literal double through super imposition, as shadow, imprints in sand, reflections in water, mirror or distorting glass. The kaleidoscope aesthetic that runs through the film serves not only to weave between image and word but also between the work of Cahun and the films of Sarah Pucill, creating a dialogue between two artists who share similar iconography and concerns.

Nicky Hamlyn is one of the UK's key artist filmmakers of the past 30 years, working in 16mm film and video, he has produced a large body of both single screen work and installations in both media. His current practice has two distinct concerns, based on the medium he is using. In much of the film work he has been concerned with developing structures that are derived as closely as possible from the form of the subject matter. In recent years the subjects have been predominantly architectural, but also topographical. He often works frame by frame, in the manner of an animator, and this approach acknowledges the importance of the individual frame as a building block for bigger structures. The aim in establishing a reciprocal relationship between the film frame, the framing edges and the subject’s formal properties, is to eliminate subjective decisions about framing and allow given parameters to have a determining effect. Much of the video work, by contrast, explores the spontaneous interactions between complex events, such as the swirling movements of layers of net curtain, and the  video technology used to record process the data it receives. This DVD makes available for the first time his major film and video works from the past 38 years and is accompanied by new essays by Simon Payne and Federico Windhausen.