Katharine Round
Artist & Filmmaker
CONTENTS
- The Divide
- Dearborn, Michigan
- Climate Symphony
- Flatline
- If The Oceans Could Speak
- Oil Coal and Gas for Three Cellos
- Twelve Thousand Years in Fragments
- Two Rooms
ABOUT
I make award-winning non-fiction films that are seen in cinemas, television, art galleries, online, and on the street. I’ve had support from the Arts Council, BFI, Creative Europe, Forma Arts, CPH:LAB, Dartmouth Films, Passion Pictures, the Guardian, Serpentine Galleries and many others.
My work is driven by a deep curiosity towards "ordinary" human beings: our contradictions, humanity and fallibility as we attempt to make sense of the world.
I often explore 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, I acknowledge a vision of the world through "imperfect" eyes: a cinema of lies as much as of truth.
This site acts as a notepad for past and ongoing work, I aim to share my evolving thought processes as well as the results.
My work is produced via Disobedient Films.
︎ ︎ ︎
CONTACT
Disobedient Films
10-28 Millers Avenue
London E8 2DS
For Sales Enquiries: info [@] disobedientfilms.com
Disobedient Films
10-28 Millers Avenue
London E8 2DS
For Sales Enquiries: info [@] disobedientfilms.com
To email me: katharineround [@] gmail dot com
![]()
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 also constitute part of my ongoing research exploring the car as a provocative documentary situation.
Image: Ghost Town poster by Version Industries
Ghost Town
Many years 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. Ghost Town is an inquiry into memory, myth, life and death using fixed cameras in the taxi cabs of the small port town
of Kamaishi. Four drivers: Konno, Iwasaki, Goto and Koike, weave their way
through the streets picking up occasional passengers and conversing with a visitor to the town about their lives.
Read more about the film here
Read more about the film here
Image: Keith, still from The Divide
Keith & I
I met Keith in 2014, when I was making my previous film, The Divide. Keith is nearing the end of a 30 year sentence for a minor drugs offence, imprisoned in Texas in 1996 as part of the US’ “three strikes” law. I had continued writing to him after our initial meeting in the film. After 3 years of doing so, I received a letter I didn’t expect. He was incensed that what I had thought was a sympathetic film had “got [him] so wrong”. I agreed with him to try and set it right, and make a new film when he was released. Then began a further 5 years of correspondence...and a film in progress that is turning out to be not quite what I expected.
Mosaics
Most of my work begins from character. I’m fascinated by people and my interest is in stories about ordinary people whose lives feel like they reveal universal truths that speak to all of us.
It is by accident that a lot of my films have multiple characters, but I am often drawn to the frameworks in which we meet people – a place, an action, a time – and how this shapes a filmic conception of the world. I seem to be obsessed with moving and reflective spaces: trains and cars (more on those later) feature heavily in ideas I’m drawn to, alongside mirrors and windows. These spaces carry a certain property for me, both symbolic and provocative. Often we catch a revealing slice of our psyches here.
The first film I made in this way was originally called “Seven Windows”, but made its way into the world under the title “The Divide”. In the film, seven unconnected people striving for a better life across the US and UK discover the odds may be stacked against them. Even though the film is quite “big” it still feels intimate. I always feel the real meaning is found in the cracks, the spaces in-between of life, where “nothing is happening”. But everything is happening in these “smaller” moments: stuck in a traffic jam, waiting on the porch, looking in the mirror. It is by observing and uncovering elements of ordinary lives that we draw parallels between them.
The Divide (2016)
Dearborn, Michigan (2017) In Dearborn Michigan, the idea was to take one place, people that lived in the same few streets, yet whose lives were worlds apart. In this film, fear is echoed in the landscape and the places we meet our characters -primarily in and around the car. In The Divide I had deliberately excluded myself from the process but in making Dearborn I realised how important it was to include myself as the lens through which we experience the film - an outsider, somewhat unwelcome, in a place of “outsiders”. Whilst filming the other, I wanted to be aware that I was revealing the self.
A Tale of Two Lands
Symphonies
Climate Symphony
A multidisciplinary collaboration between myself, journalist Leah Borromeo, and composer Jamie Perera, the early idea behind Climate Symphony was to find a way to “tell stories” through sound. As we worked together, new ideas, themes and approaches emerged and the project developed into a space to explore a range of individual and co-created artistic responses (sound, visual and both) to the idea of “symphonies” from data.
At the start, I was personally less interested in a representational approach than the idea of what happens when we transform something usually experienced in one form into something completely different. Transforming “data” into sound alters our relationship to it and provokes a more visceral and emotional response.
The concept of a symphony also has a dual meaning in film, as some of the earliest moving image works – the “city symphonies” - associate images and ideas, create new ideas from disparate elements and in essence weave a story from our world. The amassed fragments of recorded life we have gathered since the birth of the moving image is itself data. That said, a film response to the idea was not immediately forthcoming to me. I struggled with the notion of bringing a visual work into the project, as it could too easily become a fairly crass attempt to “illustrate” or “explain” the sound work. The early co-created works therefore primarily explored the situational element, placing the sound (and the audience) inside a fishtank, a gallery space, or with live performers.
We were supported in this early work by Serpentine Galleries, Sheffield Doc/Fest, the Global Health Film Festival, Forma Arts, and Arts Council England. In 2018-9 we were selected for CPH:LAB, part of CPH:DOX, designed to “support visionaries that push the existing boundaries of documentary filmmaking” by working alongside other artists in a physical residency to develop the practice and interrogate practical and theoretical principles.
These collaborative and co-directed hybrid works include:
Serpentine Transformation Marathon (2015) – discussion with Leah Borromeo, Katharine Round and Jamie Perera on the early concept
If The Oceans Could Speak (2016) – Toronto EDIT Festival. Installation concept by Leah Borromeo and Katharine Round, sound by Jamie Perera. Produced by Disobedient Films for We Are The Oceans.
Flatline (2017) – Barbican Galleries, curated by Gerri McHugh as part of Global Health Film Festival. Concept and Film Directed by Leah Borromeo and Katharine Round for Disobedient Films. Sound by Jamie Perera. Edited by Leah Borromeo with additional editing by Alex Baró Cayetano
Labs (2017) – A series of day-long events led by Katharine Round and Leah Borromeo to investigate the concept of “sound as a conduit for narrative” with a range of artists and scientists. The events included workshops led by composers Jamie Perera, Freya Berkhout and Danny Keig, and performances by Jez riley French, Kate Carr and Lee Patterson. Co-produced by Disobedient Films and Forma Arts with support from Arts Council England.
Oil Coal and Gas for Three Cellos (2020) - Concept devised by Katharine Round, Jamie Perera, and Leah Borromeo. Composed by Jamie Perera. Performed by Alice Eldridge, James Douglas, Roxanne Albayati. Commissioned by Serpentine Galleries.
The two larger works I contributed to the project as individual films, Twelve Thousand Years in Fragments and a prototype version of Ghosts in the Machine, can be exhibited in parallel with the standalone sound piece Anthropocene in C Major that sonifies 12000 years of data relating to climate change over 40 minutes.
These films attempt to find meaning from the pieces of our lives recorded and left behind: the visual detritus left in the largest online archive and repository of human knowledge. They provoke a conversation with the “truth” heard in the sound, inviting us to consider the imperfect, fragmentary nature of “data”: what is hidden and inadvertently revealed in these surreal visions.
Read more:
Twelve Thousand Years in Fragments
Ghosts in the Machine (first exhibited as part of a hybrid sound/film version of Anthropocene in C Major)
Image: Flatline, installation at Barbican Centre, LondonLondon Symphony
London Symphony combines a film directed by Alex Barrett and a score composed by James McWilliam to create a poetic journey through the city of London. I acted as producer for the film and devised a series of Arts Council England supported performances, placing the film and a live orchestra (the Covent Garden Sinfonia) into three of the sites featured in the piece in order to provoke a dialogue between “reality” and its artistic representation.
Read more