Wonderful World of Woohoo

Welcome

2009-12-02T00:10:00.006Z

to the Wonderful World of Woohoo.

This is the place for information about Sarah Wood's

filmmaking and film events.

Please step inside.

For Cultural Purposes Only

2009-11-07T13:37:00.026Z

Director | Sarah Wood
Illustration | Woodrow Phoenix
Animation | Kate Anderson
Photography | Ruanne Abu-Rahme
Cartography | Simon Deeves
Music | Basel Abbas
Edit | Lucy Harris
UK | 2009| 8 mins

In an age dominated by the moving image what would it feel like to never see an image of the place that you came from?

The Palestinian Film Archive contained over 100 films showing the daily life and struggle of the Palestinian people. It was lost in the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982.

Here interviewees describe from memory key moments from the history of Palestinian cinema. These scenes are drawn and animated. Where film survives, the artist’s impressions are corroborated. This is a film about reconstruction and the idea that cinema is an expression of cultural identity - that cinema fuels memory.

The film was commissioned by Animate Projects in association with Arts Council England and Channel 4. The title, For Cultural Purposes Only is taken from the article by Annemarie Jacir of the same name.

The film won has been awarded special mentions at Exis, Seoul, 25 fps, Zagreb and at L'Alternativa, Barcelona 'for its testimonial power and subtle use of resources when telling a story of vanished images.'

Articles:
Guardian
Sight and Sound
Dazed and Confused
Little White Lies
Frankfurter Rundschau
Rotterdam Film Festival

Media:
Start the Week

Screenings:
June 2011
Kaliber 35, Munich

March 2011
Tampere Film Festival, Tampere

Februrary 2011
British Plaestinian Film Festival, Bethlehem

January 2011
Britspotting, Berlin

November 2010
L'Alternativa, Barcelona Awarded Special Mention
Offmostoles, Madrid
Janela International Film Festival, Brazil
Kassel Documentary Film Festival

October 2010
Impakt, The Netherlands
Cortopotere, Italy
Boston Palestinian Film Festival

September 2010
25 fps, Croatia Awarded Special Mention
Branchage Film Festival, Jersey
Cambridge Film Festival, UK
Exis, Seoul Awarded Special Mention
Haifa International Film Festival, Israel

July 2010
Two Riversides

May 2010
Oberhausen Short Film Festival

April 2010
London Palestine Film Festival

March 2010
BAM, New York

January 2010
Rotterdam International Film Festival

December 2009
London, Tate Modern

Still want to look at something else? Why not read about Darwish's last collection of poems here.

Surrender!

2008-09-17T17:02:00.004+01:00

Director | Sarah Wood
Cast | Kiirik Bryson
UK/Germany | 3 mins | 2005 | video | WoohooFilm

Stop! In the name of love where did our love go? My world is empty without you – you are everything and everything is you. You keep me hanging on upside down. Remember me? It's my turn. I'm still waiting. I'm gonna make you love me. I'm coming out. I hear a symphony. Doobedood'ndoobe, doobedood'ndoobe, doobedood'ndoo.

A film about the pressures of modern love.

LIVING SPACE

2008-09-17T16:52:00.004+01:00

Director: Sarah Wood
UK | 2003 |17 mins |video

Living Space is a film about the relationship between architecture and illness. It follows the construction of a new cancer care centre designed by the architect Frank Gehry and acts as a record of the process behind, and the achievement of, creating space especially for people affected by cancer.

Funded by Wingate Trust, East England Arts, Scottish Arts Council Lottery Fund

Project
In 1988 Maggie Jencks, writer, designer, visionary landscape gardener, was diagnosed as having breast cancer. After treatment and a five year remission the cancer returned in May 1993. When it did, faced with the prospect of life after diagnosis, she came up with the idea of establishing Cancer Caring Centres, a rare premise in the UK. By 1995 the Edinburgh-based architect Richard Murphy had been asked to produce a plan for converting a stable block into a centre at Edinburgh’s Western General Hospital and Maggie had written a blueprint for the centre, and with Laura Lee, her oncology nurse, drafted its constitution. The centre opened in 1996, followed by a centre in Glasgow in 2000.

The Maggie Jencks Trust, which Maggie set up before her death, then went on to commission a new building at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee. In line with her idea that the centre should be a ‘patient centred building, with a different atmosphere from the hospital, that gives people affected by cancer freedom from the stereotyping which inevitably follows organised cancer treatment’, the Trust chose Maggie’s good friend Frank Gehry to design the site. The commission’s central, inspiring and original premise that each centre should be idiosyncratic, individual and sympathetic to its particular location was the challenge for Gehry, as he designed his first commission since the completion of the Guggenheim Gallery in Bilbao and his first ever building
in the UK. The centre was completed at the end of 2003.

For more information about Maggie's Centres, click here

THE ANGEL OF HISTORY

2008-09-15T16:14:00.007+01:00

Director: Sarah Wood
UK | 2008 | 30 mins | video

“His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” – Walter Benjamin

Home movie making bridges the gap between the impetus to record spectacle on a grand scale and to record the fragility of everyday domestic survival and change. It shifts in focus both in mechanical and aesthetic terms between the widescreen and the close-up. It brings into question what history really means. As we are propelled forward, as Walter Benjamin suggests, by the storm of progress, how do we experience history? Moving image offers us sequences from time. Frame follows frame as second follows second. But do we witness a growing pile of debris? Is history shaped by parades and pageants, or is it more truly measured by, say, the repeated first snowfalls winter after winter, the return of the flowers year after year?

THE ANGEL OF HISTORY explores the fragile relationship between personal and cultural history using footage from the Jersey Film Archive.

Screening as part of Branchage Film Festival: Jersey War Tunnels, September 27, 20:00, with live soundtrack by Zan Lyons.

MANIFESTO FOR LOVE

2008-09-10T19:12:00.004+01:00

Director | Sarah Wood
UK | 6 mins | 2003 | video | WoohooFilm

Art form crosses art form and makes a new art form.

MANIFESTO FOR LOVE is an interlayered journey into
the highs and lows of the romantic adventure: an
experiment in shape, music, vision and words to
find a new expression of love.

THE BOOK OF LOVE

2008-02-07T14:13:00.004Z

Director | Sarah Wood
UK, 2008, 20 mins

A found footage investigation into the psychosexual landscape of love.

Love is never having to say you’re sorry; love is soft as an easy chair. Is it? For decades scientists have worked hard to uncover the truth. THE BOOK OF LOVE reveals some of their findings.

THE BOOK OF LOVE premiered at the London Short Film Festival with live soundtrack by The Exploits of Elaine.

I WANT TO BE A SECRETARY

2007-02-06T14:07:00.004Z

The footage for I Want to Be a Secretary has been reclaimed and reworked from a selection of all but forgotten post-war recruitment films encouraging the modern girl to pursue a secretarial career. What other path is open to an independent-minded young lady after all? What are the secrets of the boardroom? And what is the meaning of the firm-but-fair Miss Ingall's mysterious smile? Our plucky young career gal heroine is about to find out.

I Want To Be A Secretary: A career girl's adventure in the typing pool.

For images consult the Woohoo Grand Image Archive