The Afterlight + Train Again

The Afterlight

Timeless Festival celebrates timeless cinema. Unfortunately, nothing can last forever. Archiving 35 mm tape in good condition is the best way to preserve a cinematographic legacy. But what if the film only exists as a single set of reels and is never copied or digitized? The Afterlight, Charlie Shackleton’s evocative found footage experiment, is fading away and disappearing – literally before our eyes. Each screening of the film relies on the 35 mm film stock – and when it wears down, the film will cease to exist. Evocative of the work of Bill Morrison and Guy Maddin, the project is an edited collage of fragments of hundreds of films with more and less famous actors who have one thing in common: they are all dead. Humphrey Bogart, Zbyszek Cybulski, Katharine Hepburn, Claude Laydu from The Diary of a Country Priest, Simone Simon from Cat People, and dozens of other figures wander around desolate spaces, heading for the eponymous bar. What does the cinematic afterlife look like, and does celluloid guarantee immortality?

Train Again

A wild ride through the history of cinema, aboard a phantom train hurtling through filthy, ragged tape. A kinetic, luminescent, ear-piercing essay stitched together from scraps of celluloid. The ‘train enters the station’ theme as conceptual action cinema, proving that good old 35 mm cannot be sidelined.

Sebastian Smoliński

Charlie Shackleton (b. 1991) is a British filmmaker, multimedia artist and film critic. Most of his films, such as his debut Beyond Clueless (2014) and Fear Itself (2015), can be classified as film essays, exploring various film genres. He has also made the film Paint Drying (2023), lasting over 10 hours and showing nothing but paint drying on a wall, to protest against the current system of film classification in the UK.

Peter Tscherkassky (b. 1958) is an Austrian experimental filmmaker who works mainly with found footage. He has made numerous short films, always working with actual film rather than utilising digital technology. He has organized several avant-garde film festivals and also had his own work shown at film festivals: Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (2005) and Train Again (2021) both premiered at Cannes.