TRAIL OF THE SPIDER (UK, 2008)
Writer/Director: Anja Kirschner & David Panos
Camera: Matthew Noel-Tod
More cast & crew credits...
Runtime: 53’40”
Language: English
Colour: Colour
Sound: Stereo
Format: SD / PAL / 16:9 Anamorphic
Funded by Arts Council England, London with the support of Film London Artists' Moving Image Network and supported by the Elephant Trust.
Screenings & Exhibitons:
| 30 May | Premiere, TATE MODERN, London |
| 2-9 June | Nought to Sixty, INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, London |
| 3-8 June | Hollybush Gardens, ART BASEL | ART PREMIERE, Basel |
| 12 June | CINEMA MOSOR, Zagreb |
| 24 July | Hackney Premiere, CHATS PALACE, London |
| 22 August | MON AMI, Weimar |
| 22 August | PIRATE TV | CONTAINER PROJECT, Palmers Cross, Jamaica |
| 25 October | TRANSMISSION GALLERY, Glasgow |
ABOUT TRAIL OF THE SPIDER:
Trail of the Spider transposes Western genre motifs and the suppressed racial history of the American West (where one in three cowboys were black or Mexican) onto the transforming landscape of East London. Questioning and re-imagining the Western’s portrayal of the “Vanishing Frontier” , the film extends the metaphor to the material and psychological conditions of the present.
Recreating the epic panoramas of the Western in Hackney Marshes, the Thames Gateway and Essex, on landfills, wastelands and gravel pits linked to the construction of the 2012 Olympic Park, the film allegorizes the shifting and shrinking space for collective social and political agency, self-determination and dissent in an urban reality increasingly dominated by volatile financial speculations, private interests and the spectre of the Olympic gold rush.
Working with a large cast of actors and non-actors (many of whom are themselves residents of East London), the film explores the compromises and ordeals of a population facing this new order. Many of the film’s verbal exchanges are rooted both in historic sources and the collective experiences of the players and filmmakers (linked in many cases through political activism and friendship), opening up a discursive field in which past and present are held in an uneasy suspension.