LONG TAKE: Come on Pilgrim

Saturday 14 March, 2-4pm, LUX.

Spirit of Mayday

Film & Photo League, 1937, 11 mins

In 1937, members of the Film & Photo League lined the route of London's May Day procession, armed with cameras with their mottos 'Show Workers’ Films' and 'Make Workers’ Films'. The procession was organised by the Communist Party of Great Britain and other left-wing groups.

Merry Month of May

Film & Photo League, 1937, 15 mins

The 1937 coronation of King George VI coincided with London busmen striking for a seven and a half hour working day. This film captures the patriotic fervour of the celebrations juxtaposed with scenes of military destruction and urban poverty. This ambitious production survives incomplete, but its experimental approach resonates with films like Vigo’s A Propo De Nice (1930) and Stork’s Histoire du Soldat inconnu (1931).

Come on Pilgrim

Mars Saude, 2022, 27 mins

A series of visual field recordings and staged interventions captured on expired film, Come On Pilgrim draws on the filmmaker's experience of living in a flat overlooking the Mayflower steps in Plymouth. This location serves as a jumping-off point to interrogate histories of settler-colonialism, identity, and mythos in the surrounding landscape, from the viewpoint of a recent immigrant.

Lagareh – The Last Born

Alberta Whittle, 2022, 43 mins

This film discusses theories of abolition, rebellion, ancestral knowledge and love. Shot in Scotland, London and Barbados, it focuses on the strength of contemporary Black womxn, whose acts of resistance are bound together through conceptual storytelling. It calls for radical change in Western society, where racist, imperialist agendas permeate through a culture of systemic institutional racism. The film's title refers to Sheku Bayoh, who lost his life in Scotland while in police custody.

Discussion with moving image artist Mars Saude, artist and researcher Matthias Kispert, and artist filmmaker and lecturer Samuel Stevens.

Biographies

Matthias Kispert is an artist, researcher and educator with an interest in the intersections of art, politics and activism. His practice-based PhD uses artistic research methods to investigate precarious forms of work distributed through digital platforms, also known as the ‘gig economy’. He is a founding editor of , is coordinating the Committee on Activism for the International Initiative for Promoting Political Economy (IIPPE), and teaches at the University of the Arts London and the University of Westminster.

Mars da Silva Saude works with time-based media involving subjects such as marginal histories, the landscape, neurodivergent poetics, counterculture, radical politics, and text(s). Their moving image work has screened at venues and festivals including Open City Documentary Festival, Experiments in Cinema, FLEX Fest, Analogica, Mimesis Documentary Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Torino Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and artist-run labs and DIY project spaces internationally. Saude is a member of the Filmwerkplaats collective moving image lab in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, as well as BEEF in Bristol, UK. A Portuguese national, they work in Aberystwyth, Wales, where they tend Labordy Ffilm Aber and are one half of sound duo Landscape Suicide.

Samuel Stevens is an artist filmmaker, curator and Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster. He led the community filmmaking East End Stories: Workers Newsreel Project (2024), and co-curated the exhibition Now Filming Art Documentary and Resistance in 1930s East London (2025), with Four Corners. Stevens’ work received an Arts Foundation Fellowship Award (2017), for Essay Film, and has participated in exhibitions in Madrid, Dublin, London, Oxford and Taipei.

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