Trouble

Trouble is the second part of a project that uses archive photographs to explore a history of bombing. While puzzling over aerial photographs from early 20th century Iraq and Egypt, a filmmaker finds herself increasingly unsettled by images that want to share their violent secrets. England has been colonised by a marauding spirit and the Empire’s undead start to speak back to the film’s troubled investigator. Moving between the recent past and the distant past, this film is a ghost story that explores horror - both real and imagined.

"A peculiar presence haunts the Crawford collection, at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology, and is spreading across London; like an echo of the curse of the Pharaohs, this spectral threat manifests itself through a mysterious malaise. Miranda Pennell’s research on the photographic archives of British rule over Egypt and Iraq in the early 20th century is like a detective investigation, searching for the clues that have been unwillingly left behind by the very same butchers who have been praised by History as civilizers. In these images of ruins illustrating the imperialist enterprise of knowledge and control, Pennell discovers the scars hidden by the archives; like so many unhealed wounds through which repressed History surges back to challenge the official narrative. Through these cracks, the victims of British (and European) colonisation rise from the dead to seek revenge; forever invisible, they manifest themselves through the sound of 1950’s and 1960’s horror films. By mixing the essay form with genre films, Pennell creates a horror story that is terribly real; the horrors of the past and of our present merge and crack the seemingly smooth surface of History to expose yesterday’s and today’s hidden violence. The malaise that is consuming our present is the curse of colonisation. The film forces us to stare into the darkness of History and to hold the gaze it reflects back."
(Margot Mecca - FIDMarseille)