Game Keepers Without Game is a film set within the structure of a feature length melodrama. Formally based on the Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s play La Vida es Suena (Life is a Dream), it follows the narrative of the return of a child who had been banished from the family home. Translated into contemporary British life, the film is comprised of a mixture of acted scenes where nothing and nobody touches each other. Still shots of objects fluctuate between being status symbols, evidence of crime and theatrical props. A drumming sound track builds up and breaks down like the building of a house.

Emily Wardill‘s Sea Oak was developed from a series of interviews conducted with the The Rockridge Institute, a left-orientated think tank located in Berkeley, California. From 2001 until its closure in April 2008, the Institute researched contemporary political rhetoric with special emphasis on the employment of metaphor and framing.

The strict absence of images throughout the film is introduced by institute member Eric Haas. He describes how, in everyone’s imagination, the word “bird” evokes a similar imagined creature. This prototypical bird exists only in common thought (“We don’t think of an ostrich or a penguin…”) and provides the idea of an image to begin a film consisting only of black leader and sound. In the sole spotlight of the space, only the apparatus can be seen, the film projector, staged like a sculpture.

Kristl was a member of the prestigious Zagreb Studio of Animation and his early works as painter and filmmaker had brought him instant acclaim and instant censorship. He fled Croatia and lived in Germany; he died there in 2004. Poor People, a “collective scream” of Cold War fear, was produced just after he left his country.