University of Kent

Profile

Sarah Turner is an artist who writes and makes films. Her work spans single screen gallery pieces (rooted in the formal preoccupations of the avant-garde from which she emerged) to feature length projects that explore new narrative forms and the cinematic potential of subjective storytelling. All of her films have toured nationally and internationally and several have been broadcast through artists’ showcases on Channel 4.
Sarah has had feature scripts commissioned by the British Film Institute, Film Four Lab and Zephyr Films. She was the writer in residence in the Dept of English and Related Literature at the University of York (2004). In the same year she received a Small Grant for the Creative and Performing Arts from the AHRC in order to investigate and produce an alternative to a script-based filmmaking practice through an innovative, location based process that exploits the responsive potential of digital video technologies. Her feature film, Ecology, 2007 was the result of this process:
“Ecology is a feature film in three parts, three characters and three stories to be screened in any order: the stories of a mother, a daughter and a son, on holiday in Majorca. This is not the Majorca of package holidays but a writer’s retreat, a location solar powered and environmentally responsible. Delivered as three internal monologues narrated as voice-over, we are caught in the rhythms of an urgent repetition of events past and scraps of imagined dialogue directed at but never spoken to an other. Appearing to reference a debate on the ethics of the environment, Ecology innovatively turns the idea towards the ethics of psychic recycling, the debris passed on and re-circulated among people. Yet its power resides in the ability to pull us into each character’s internal world, to invite our complicity with each point of view – and then in moving on, to show us the error of our ways.” Cambridge Film festival

For the Birds Eye View film festival 2008, Sarah orchestrated an ‘innovative cinematic symphony of women's voices from around the world’ in an interactive mobile phone filmmaking project. This groundbreaking project invited participants to engage, by making a quick film - between 40 seconds and 4 minutes long - on a mobile phone, in response to the theme: OVERHEATED. Submitted films could be viewed on You Tube or on the Birds Eye blog so that women had an opportunity to respond to other work and to engage in a dialogue of ideas.
The participative nature of the project was then extended through a live edit that took place at the Institute of Contemporary Art on the 9th March. There, Sarah and sound designer Annabelle Pangborn, sampled moments from the submitted films using the structure of a symphony to edit the work. The completed symphony is now available via You Tube and Birds Eye View’s website.

Sarah newest film is Perestroika, commissioned by London Artist’s Film and Video:
Perestroika is a single screen feature film composed of two sequences: one essayistic, the other fictional. Imagery in both is limited to two journeys on the Trans-Siberian train that span twenty years: 1988-2008. Both ghost story and psycho-geographic document, the work explores technologies of memory.

Teaching

Sarah is the Programme Director of the Practice as Research MA.
She teaches and convenes two courses:

• FI555 - An Introduction to Screenwriting (2nd year)
• F1567 - Moving Image Production (3rd year)

Productions

Filmography

• Overheated Symphony (2008)
• Ecology (2007)
• London Birds Can't Fly (2003)
• CUT (2001)
• A Life in a Day with Helena Goldwater (1996)
• Sheller Shares her Secret (1994)
• A Tale Part Told (1991)
• One and the other time (1990)
• She Wanted Green Lawns (1989)

Broadcast

• 'Shooting Gallery', Channel 4. Nov 2000 - Cut // Repeat Screening, C 4. Nov 2001 - Cut
• 'Midnight Underground', Channel 4 Sept 1996 - A Life in a Day with Helena Goldwater
• 'Midnight Underground' Channel 4 Sept 1996 - Sheller Shares her Secret
• ' Midnight Underground' Channel 4 Oct 1997 - Repeat screening of A Life in a Day ...
• Film Four digital - Sheller Shares her Secret and profile of filmmaker, 1998

Tours include

• Flesh Histories - Curated by Tom Kalin - 1992
• 'Sight & Sound/BFI Women Making Movies Tour' UK - 1995
• Beacons of Style: A history of Experimental Cinema - Curated by Cinenova UK - 1998
• The Raw and The Cooked. Fourth ICA Biennial curated by B. Ruby Rich - ongoing.

Publications and Selected Bibliography

• CUT. COIL magazine - 1999
• The Raw and the Cooked - The fourth ICA Biennial. B. Ruby Rich, Chris Darke 1997
• A Directory of British Film and Video Artists - Arts Council Of England/University of Luton Press 1996
• Beacons of Style - Cinenova/The Arts Council Of England 1998 www.bftv.ac.uk/avantgarde