Screening at Cinema Zuid, 8pm
Lakenstraat 14, Antwerp
Free admission

On Wednesday 14 December 2011 at 8pm, Emily Wardill’s film Fulll Firearms premieres at Cinema Zuid in Antwerp. Fulll Firearms is a feature film about a woman who constructs a house to accommodate the ghosts of people killed by the guns of her father’s firearm company. Following the screening Emily Wardill will join in an after talk with Dieter Roelstraete, the new Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (from February 2012). A response to the film will be read out by Jacob Korczynksi, curator at the Art Gallery of York University in Toronto.

Based on the life of Sarah Winchester and the Winchester Mystery House, Fulll Firearms presents the story of Imelda, a woman haunted by the victims of the guns sold in her father’s company. She uses her inheritance to work with an architect who builds a house for these ghosts. When a group of people squat her half finished building Imelda is convinced that they are the ghosts that she expected. Fulll Firearms is a story of a house build to deliberately disorientate its inhabitants. The narrative touches upon themes of displacement and storytelling, and stands in the tradition of melodrama. The characters find themselves constantly having to adjust their expectations of each other so that they might be able to communicate within each other’s logic. In her films, Emily Wardill creates situations that examine conditions of precarity in society and how these affect people’s relationships with each other. Her films are fostered by improvisations and workshop sessions, that are set up by the artist to develop themes and characters in a collaborative manner.

“Fulll Firearms reframes the history of arms heiress Sarah Winchester in a contemporary context where her haunting is not limited to America and the specter of its own violence en route to manifest destiny, but rather is inundated with the scope of the contemporary international arms trade and the nations that bear the brunt of its success. The house in the film produces an echo, because those who occupy it articulate their voices in relation to the making and writing of a history. Tracing the echoes of actions through the production of social spaces does not remain solely within the diegesis of the film. Instead, it extends to the exchange initiated by Wardill with her collaborators as they produce a film together, and also attempt to implicate the viewer in a film that is also a body – one that is constantly living and growing.”
– Jacob Korczynski, 2011

Emily Wardill
Emily Wardill is a London-based filmmaker. She has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, including solo projects at de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam (2010), The Showroom, London (2009) the ICA, London (2008), Fortescue Avenue/Jonathan Viner, London (2005, 2006), Standard, Oslo (2008) and the performance event The Feast Against Nature, at PS1 Contemporary Art Centre, New York (2004). She has shown at Tate Britain, Film Festival Oberhausen, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Witte de With, the London and New York Film Festival, MOCA Miami, was included in The British Art Show 2010/11, won the Jarman Award and showed at MIT List at the end of 2010. She is currently showing in the Venice Biennale. Emily Wardill is one of the five artists commissioned by If I Can’t Dance to make a new work as part of Edition IV (2010-2012) on Affect. The other artists are Jeremiah Day, Sung Hwan Kim, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, and Hito Steyerl.

Fulll Firearms
Writer and director: Emily Wardill
Director of Photography: Taina Galis
Editor: Maya Maffioli
Cast: Ariyon Bakare; Danielle Urbas; Lloyd Mosengo; Catherine Schaub Abkarian; Wolf Kahler; Holli Dempsey; Elizabeth Elvin; Carl Patrick; Avin Shah; Edward Akrout
Production: Film London and City Projects

After the presentation at Cinema Zuid, Fulll Firearms will be shown at the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe and in FRAC Champagne-Ardenne in Reims, and in the Netherlands and England in 2012.

Partners
Fulll Firearms is co-commissioned by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, Serpentine Gallery, and Film London’s FLAMIN Productions. It is co-produced by FLAMIN Productions and City Projects with support from M HKA, Antwerp, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe and FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims.

Fulll Firearms is funded by Arts Council England through Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network; Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe; FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims and the Culture Programme of the European Union and Mondriaan Foundation through If I Can’t Dance. The film is supported by Serpentine Gallery, London and M HKA, Antwerp.