Laida Lertxundi (b. 1981, Spain) makes films with non-actors – often friends – in and around Los Angeles, the city where she studied under James Benning and Thom Andersen, and where she has been living for a number of years. Shot under the blue Californian sky, her films feature the same topography as Hollywood cinema. Lertxundi questions cinematic conventions of representation and storytelling in her work at the same time that she proposes new associations between sound and image. In London, Beatrice Gibson (b. 1978, UK) addresses similar formal and conceptual concerns in her work, which is also shaped by the material constraints and aesthetic properties of 16mm film. Beyond the differences in the specific subjects of their films, the underlying themes in their work – speculative narrative, film as landscape, sound as material, the production process, collaborative practice – resonate in an uncanny way. The screening will be followed by a conversation between the two filmmakers and curator Maria Palacios Cruz, who has written an essay on the films of Gibson and Lertxundi for the forthcoming issue of Sequence.