Category: Film

  • A sketch for the centenary

    My paternal grandfather Mikhail Gefter was a historian, philosopher, intellectual. As an adult, years after his death I learned of his pupils throughout the world,  of his philosophical and historical writings,  and of the www.gefter.ru platform for social sciences and intellectual thought named after him. Many called him МЯ (Михаил Яковлевич – Mikhail Yakovlevich). I called […]

  • 30 April 1978

    40 years ago today – Red Saunders recollects the RAR Victoria Park Carnival: On Sunday 30 April 1978, 80,000 people gathered in Trafalgar Square, and danced their way through the East End to Victoria Park in Hackney for the first big Rock Against Racism Carnival Against the Nazis. RAR had emerged in reaction to an alarming […]

  • Lviv-London Double Impact

    Join us at Pushkin House, London on November 14 for a special evening of imagery, history, words and music with London resident Asya Gefter, who has just launched the ‘Fragments of Memory’ project in Lviv, and Lviv resident Mark Tokar, double bass player and a key figure in the Ukrainian free jazz scene. Over the past two […]

  • From Pop Art to Community Arts

    It has been an absolute joy to work with Peter Young on a film ‘From Pop Art to Community Arts: Hackney in the 1970s-80s’ commissioned for A British Museum Partnership exhibition ‘Warhol to Walker: American prints from pop art to today’. This special exhibition explores the influence print movements have had on Hackney. Starting with […]

  • Acacias Bloom

    Last year I have been awarded an Asylum Arts Grant to collaborate with a Ukrainian musician Olesya Zdorovetska to research Debora Vogel, an overlooked Polish Yiddish writer of poetry, prose, literary and art criticism from the 1930s avant-garde Lviv. And so in July 2016, supported by the Asylum Arts (US) and a-n Travel Bursary  (UK) off we went on our audio-visual […]

  • ‘Seed to Harvest’ Sukkot performance

    Thanks to the continuing support of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, I organised a Sukkot meal and live performance event in Dublin on October 16, 2016. The Quartet (Olesya Zdorovetska – voice, Nick Roth – saxophones, Olie Brice – double bass, Matthew Jacobson – percussion) performed Seeds II, a study of plant genetics […]

  • In the footsteps of Hanukkah

    Having grown up in Moscow in an assimilated environment I experienced mixed feelings about the traditions of my grandparents. I moved away from my family at the age of 21 in the attempt to make a new home, first in the Netherlands and then in the UK. It took me many years to discover the […]

  • Filmmaking and Hackney

    I am contributing a video piece for the 24h Hackney film as well as the Hackney archive showreel to the Open Cinema film festival on Saturday November 21 at Open School East, 43 De Beauvoir Rd, N1 5SQ. Do come along if free and up for some quirky, serious, funny, contemporary and historical footage about Hackney. Read more here

  • One Sunday Over The Lea

    In collaboration with Brian Walker and Peter Young, I submitted this short piece to the My London Film competition, held by the East End Film Festival in partnership with Time Out London and YouTube. Yesterday we got the news that the film made the competition’s official TOP 15 list and will be screened  this Saturday afternoon at 1.30pm as part of a […]

  • Clorinde @Trangallan

    The Clorinde boys – brothers Simone and Andrea Salvatici with David Harris and Derek Yau in the background – performing at Trangallan in Newington Green. My camera seems to coping just fine.