Bloom / Enys Men

Sun 02.06.
20:00

Cinema

Arsenal 1

Bloom

BLOOM is an imaginary portrait of the mythical island of San Borondón shot on shimmering 16mm: great expanses of rock, tall flowers swaying in the wind, underwater creatures, specimen jars and pressed flowers; natural exploration as melancholy and solitude. (jl)

Enys Men

It's 1973 and a woman is volunteering for the Wildlife Trust on an otherwise uninhabited Cornish island to observe the local flora. Each day resembles the next: making tea, reading books about the environmental movement, speaking to colleagues on the mainland via radio, walking to the cliffs by the former tin mine to inspect the strange flowers that grow there, writing “no change” in the log book. But solitude is a powerful force and this now-abandoned landscape feels almost haunted by its industrial past; when lichen begins to finger its way across the flowers and the woman’s body alike, loneliness quickly spirals into dread. Shot on stunning hand-developed 16mm celluloid, Mark Jenkin’s follow up to Bait (Berlinale Forum 2019) generates horror by way of rhythm, repetition and deviation to illustrate how nature ultimately reclaims everything. (jl)