The Cinema Dynamo is happy to present When you fall into a Trance (courtesy carlier | gebauer), a feature-length film by British artist Emily Wardil (b.1977). Wardill creates both shorts and feature-length films. Her film subjects include ghost stories, mental illness, religion, contemporary art and visual culture.

When you fall into a Trance is part of a series of Wardill’s films that share a common interest in the complexities of communication and representation, the limitations and imprecision of language, and the individual nature of imagination. It traces the relationships between Dominique, a neuroscientist, Simon, her patient, Tony, a synchronized swimmer, and Hugo, an aid worker. Simon is suffering from the loss of his proprioception, his sense of the relative position of his body parts as well as his understanding of the effort required to move them. His vision seems essential to his physical agency—if he cannot see his body, then the movement and control of his gestures become unmoored. As the film unfolds, Dominique’s fascination with the complexities of the mind-body relationship exemplified by Simon’s condition spins beyond her work and into her life.

The film places the characters, and us along with them, in an unstable orbit in which the perceptual aids of vision, location and language slide and refract, superimpose or splinter, and the supposed transparency of their role in our awareness of ourselves and others is called into question. Setting in motion the intricacies of human relationships, in which bodies betray words, and touch and music seduce memory, Wardill’s film is equally sinister and tender.

Emily Wardill (b.1977) is a British filmmaker and performance artist. She creates both shorts and feature-length films. Wardill’s work has been exhibited at Art Basel, the Serpentine Gallery, Tate Britain, and the Venice Biennale. Her films have appeared in the International Film Festival Rotterdam, London Film Festival, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, and Toronto International Film Festival, among others.

Wardill will present a specially commissioned new work on the occasion of the Biennial of Moving Images 2016 (BIM).