This film will only screen in person at BFI Southbank on Thursday 9 December.
What will the world know of us after we’re gone? Are the ways we aim to preserve ourselves as vulnerable to time’s passing as our own bodies?
Charlie Shackleton’s The Afterlight is a witty, philosophically compelling film essay on cinematic afterlives. An ethereal montage, it’s composed from excerpts from hundreds of films with one thing in common: the actors in the films are no longer alive. A playful yet haunting look at the immortality that stardom promises us, The Afterlight is for anyone who loves the hum of the projector reels…
Following his previous documentaries Beyond Clueless and Fear Itself (which looked at the phenomenology of teen movies and horror films respectively), The Afterlight goes deeper into the very experience of cinema itself. In a formal gesture that deepens its provocation, the film exists on just one 35mm print, and as it circulates, it will degrade, becoming a document of all those whose hands it has passed through, and eventually disappearing itself.
