Katharine Round
Filmmaker
CONTENTS
· Mosaics
· Road Movies
· Symphonies and Expanded Cinema
· All the Films I Never Made
· About
ABOUT
My films are driven by a deep curiosity towards "ordinary" human beings: our contradictions, humanity and fallibility as we attempt to make sense of the world.
My work often explores specific situations that illuminate wider thematic ideas, with formalist intervention to “provoke reality” and uncover new ways of seeing our lives. I don’t hide my presence and aim to question myself as much as I do others, and as such, my films acknowledge a vision of the world through "imperfect" eyes: a cinema of lies as much as of truth.
I've made work for, and had support from, the Arts Council, BFI, Creative Europe, Forma Arts, CPH:LAB, Dartmouth Films, Passion Pictures, the Guardian, Serpentine Galleries and many others.
This site acts as a notepad for past and ongoing work, nothing is permanent as I aim to share my evolving thought processes as well as the results.
My work is produced via Disobedient Films.
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CONTACT
Disobedient Films
10-28 Millers Avenue
London E8 2DS
Disobedient Films
10-28 Millers Avenue
London E8 2DS
Home
Road Movies
Situation is key to my conception of film, in both a poetic and physical sense. I am drawn to ideas that exist as their own “theatres”, showing a slice of the world within a defined frame. Place is also a “provocation to reality”: how we encounter the world shapes our perception of it, and the construction of situations can act as a catalyst to revealing character, both in front of and behind the camera.
The car is a paradoxical space for situationist intervention - both confined yet embodied in a landscape, fixed yet transient and holding its own social dynamics in microcosm. It acts as a metaphorical container for interior and exterior “journeying”: through psyches, landscapes, and cultures. In two new films I explore the transience of life through the car.
The below films are currently in production, and also constitute part of my ongoing research exploring the car as a provocative documentary situation.
Image: The Brown Bunny (Vincent Gallo)
A Japanese Ghost Story
A year ago, I heard that in the north eastern reaches of Japan, taxi drivers were picking up passengers that turned-out to be non-existent - ghosts or imaginings, perhaps due to the grief felt almost a decade on from the tsunami. Regardless of the reason, no one wants to talk openly about it. A Japanese Ghost Story is an inquiry into memory, myth, life and death using fixed cameras in the taxi cabs of the small port town
of Kamaishi. Three drivers, Toru, Goto and Chikako, weave their way
through the streets picking up occasional passengers and conversing with an
unseen stranger about their lives.
Image: Keith, still from The Divide
Keith & I
Around the same time I received a letter from Keith, one of the participants in my previous film, The Divide. Keith is nearing the end of a 25 year sentence for a minor drugs offence, imprisoned in the Texan desert in 1996 as part of the US’ “three strikes” law. I had continued writing to him for the five years after our initial meeting in the film. Keith’s letter delivered an additional blow I wasn’t expecting. He was incensed that my sympathetic film had “got [him] so wrong”. I agreed with him to try and set it right.
On 4th July 2022 he is due to be released, and I will go back - driving to meet him at the prison gates, where we’ll take a journey by car together 2,000 miles from Texas to his hometown in the Appalachian mountains. Keith And I installs me in a car with my protagonist, again using small fixed cameras, and charts the unfolding of the filmmaker-character relationship over several months in a space that is simultaneously an emblem of freedom, a prison, a prism and a confession box.
It is a story about two people - from opposite ends of the world in every way - trying to establish common ground whilst making a film. Me behind the wheel, Keith, on his first journey out of prison, the first sight of a country not seen for 25 years, an attempt to find his place in a world that’s changed immeasurably. We will be travelling through the landscape and people of modern day America arguing, learning about each other (and ourselves), finding common ground, uncovering secrets, searching for happiness and confronting fears. The film is about him but also about me: what motivates someone to put someone else on camera, and in telling stories can we ever get it “right”?
Over the time we spend together, there will be an account of a friendship built or lost, and at the end we will either have found new ground or we will part ways forever. It’s a small story that has huge ramifications for how we live, a universal stories of opposites echoing the modern-day divide between the US and Europe… all taking place in the prism of one car journey.
The film is supported by Creative Europe and is being co-produced with Passion Pictures and Dartmouth Films.
On 4th July 2022 he is due to be released, and I will go back - driving to meet him at the prison gates, where we’ll take a journey by car together 2,000 miles from Texas to his hometown in the Appalachian mountains. Keith And I installs me in a car with my protagonist, again using small fixed cameras, and charts the unfolding of the filmmaker-character relationship over several months in a space that is simultaneously an emblem of freedom, a prison, a prism and a confession box.
It is a story about two people - from opposite ends of the world in every way - trying to establish common ground whilst making a film. Me behind the wheel, Keith, on his first journey out of prison, the first sight of a country not seen for 25 years, an attempt to find his place in a world that’s changed immeasurably. We will be travelling through the landscape and people of modern day America arguing, learning about each other (and ourselves), finding common ground, uncovering secrets, searching for happiness and confronting fears. The film is about him but also about me: what motivates someone to put someone else on camera, and in telling stories can we ever get it “right”?
Over the time we spend together, there will be an account of a friendship built or lost, and at the end we will either have found new ground or we will part ways forever. It’s a small story that has huge ramifications for how we live, a universal stories of opposites echoing the modern-day divide between the US and Europe… all taking place in the prism of one car journey.
The film is supported by Creative Europe and is being co-produced with Passion Pictures and Dartmouth Films.