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Zone 4 - is a psychogeographical film exploring the landscape of the urban edgelands sandwiched between the North Circular road and the M25. It is a poetic moving image work celebrating the ever shifting landscape between suburbia and the city. A liminal space of abandoned forecourts disrupted by wild shrubbery; giant concrete flyovers and functional flat-pack warehouses gridded into trading estates.
The subjects I am interested in while making this film are ones of marginalisation and wilderness. Edgelands evoke mythology around criminal behaviour, burnt out cars and disposed of bodies. Paradoxically, they also embody the mundane, the cultureless and the purely functional.
Most of Zone 4 was shot on old stock Super8 negative film and hand processed using coffee as a developing acid. The coffee stains the negative film yellow/brown, when inverted in post production the film becomes blue/lavender.
The quality of the home developed Super8 evokes fractured memory and time. I am exploring the dialogue between the materiality of the film to the edgeland spaces I’m filming. I entered into the film making process in an experimental spirit, exploring this space to see what I find as the edgelands are often traveled through and “looked at, but rarely looked into.” Paul Farley. While the approach has been investigative, it has also be celebratory of the space where I spent so many childhood hours dreaming.