Trouble

Synopsis

Trouble is the second part of a project that uses archive photographs to explore a history of bombing. While puzzling over aerial photographs from early-20th-century Iraq and Egypt, a filmmaker finds herself increasingly unsettled by images that want to share their violent secrets. England has been colonised by a marauding spirit, and the Empire’s undead start to speak back to the film’s troubled investigator. Moving between the recent and distant past, this film is a ghost story that explores horror, both real and imagined, and offers a counternarrative of British colonialism in the Middle East.

Biography and Films

Miranda Pennell is a London-based filmmaker whose work uses images from British state archives to reflect on the legacies of imperialism. Her films emphasise the role of the imagination in the interpretation of historical documents, most recently drawing on genre-fiction as a way of engaging with troubled histories. Pennell received an MA in visual anthropology in 2010 from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and she completed her PhD research at the University fo Westminster in 2016. Her films have been screened at IFFR, New York FF, Berlinale, London IFF and Viennale, among others.