Made between 2018-2022 across different time scales and locations across the world. Denim Sky is a feature film in three parts.
Together the trilogy is a playful exploration of non-nuclear family and community structures, the theoretical effects of non-linear time travel on human relationships, and how this could aid or problematise communication. The narrative is based on a fiction about a spaceship crew brought together in order to develop a crew mentality, so that they can be used to test a new form of space travel that uses non-linear time. Throughout, the light humour and fraternal mood of the group are disrupted by unsettling and unexpected events.
The film was shot in London, Lithuania and Scotland with an ensemble cast.
The cast includes the artist, her two children and a small group of friends and collaborators who were willing to go on the journey with the artist. Shot over four years, the younger participants grow and change before our eyes, and the sense of purpose of the film is shaped by the changes in the inner and outer worlds of the participants. The iconic sites of the National Gallery and Neolithic locations of Orkney extend the span of history and create a dream like setting against which the cast reflect on their journey.
Part One: Where there is a joyous mood, there a comrade will appear to share a glass of wine
The first film of the trilogy concerns non-nuclear family aka intergenerational friendship and community building through a story about space travel and non-linear time. The film is like a spell or a promise for a new and more freeing type of family structure. Shot in Lithuania, London, and Edinburgh, the film features the artist and her children, as well as close friends, which she considers extended family. This group of people travel to the Baltic coast and spend some days together in accommodation there, getting to know one another, playing together and discussing the fear of losing loved ones in the progression of technology, love in the wider community compared to romantic love, and what could happen to communication in non-linear time.
Part Two: The Moon nearly at the full. The team horse goes astray.
The group meet again almost a year later, at the Baltic Sea in deep winter. There are new members, two of whom are older, and another family structure of mother in her sixties and child in her thirties. At the start the group assemble in a soviet era cinema and hear a mission statement from an operative back in London. They are told they will experience faster than light travel and the possible disastrous effects it will have on their bodies. After this they spend time together in large institution-like accommodation. After an evening dinner together and silent breakfast, three of them go to a life-guard’s cabin on the beach. Here Elena and Pauline, a woman and a child, leave the cabin while Liudvikas watches them and communicates by radio. As they leave the cabin Elena disappears. At the beach however, the child Pauline has to return to Liudvikas alone. Pauline and Pietro the two children, fight, and Matthew appears outside made up as an animal. At the end of the film the women gather together in a jacuzzi, finally the two oldest members of the group tell poems and stories from the jacuzzi, as a response to the mission question- can stories survive in space? This work seeks to question how a group’s coherence is dissolved when there is an absence of communal experience and adherence to linear time.
Part Three: The wind blows over the lake and stirs the surface of the water. Thus visible effects of the invisible show themselves.
Part three is the most dream like part of the film. In reality and in the film two years have passed, the characters are the film maker – a single mother with two kids that are now 10 and 13 years old, and four other adults, the core group since the start of the film. The mother; Rosie and her friend Elena talk on the phone while Elena walks through the deserted National Gallery in her dressing gown, they talk about what happened when Elena disappeared from the lander in part two, and the fact that Rosie; the mother, has since started a new relationship, and this changes the dynamic between the two of them and may also alter the possibilities of the mini- community. The group stay in a house by the sea on the island of Orkney and the final part of the film further explores the relationship between the participants, and family life, with a reading from a psychic, channeling the energy of the mother and the son.
