More than 50 years ago, deaf Scotsman James Duthie cycled from his fishing village to the Arctic cycle. Together with deaf actor / filmmaker Samuel Dore, Matt Hulse set out on the long journey through northern Europe to adapt this story into his first feature film. Hulse mixes fictional and documentary elements into a virtuoso blend: unusual people in fictional Super 8-films, playful animated sequences and archive footage of the era in the countries traversed.
Hulse was commissioned to rephotograph a pivotal scene, shot for shot, from his Super 8mm film On Returning (1989), revisiting the same location (Isle of Mull) along with the film’s original players – himself and his mother. The latter however, now 74 years old and living in Bristol, declined to travel. This is the result.
TOGETHER APART is Matt Hulse's third film featuring dogs. It explores a state of misgiving between two characters with different world views: a domesticated, fenced-in American dachshund (Jerry) and a wilder, free-running Scottish sheepdog (Kep). Hope fuels a state of ongoing discomfort as the pair seek to connect. The film was the outcome of a year-long artist's residency coordinated by ACES (Aberdeen Centre for Environmental Sustainability) and The University of Aberdeen, funded by Creative Scotland. The residency brought together artists, natural and social scientists and ecologists to examine issues of environmental conflict and to explore conflict resolution. The screenplay was developed collaboratively by artist filmmaker Matt Hulse and Professor of Geography Bill Adams. US documentary director Elizabeth Lawrence provides the voice.
Created through a process of close collaboration between director, performer and crew, this thoroughly eccentric and stylistically original film does not attempt to narrate a dream, though it exploits the same kind of mechanisms that dreams utilise.
In an office world of half light, flickering fluorescent tubing, ringing phones and monotonous paperwork, the residents sit trapped in a state of frustration, inactivity, boredom or semi-consciousness. As the lights flicker, they get on with their chores and tasks, maybe half aware that they may never escape their surroundings for anything better.
Circle Beach. A God-forsaken, forgotten corner off the east coast of the once-great city of New York. Only the toughest can survive in an environment this harsh.
An affectionate and hilarious reconstruction of the story of The Hippies, Britain’s youngest punk band, formed by artist Matt Hulse and his siblings in 1979.
`A comic and unsettling surrealist film. A man rushes and gyrates through
spaces with measured movements, through levels of film emulsion and through
suggested thoughts and memories that rattle in and around him.' An exploration
into the behaviour of a vulnerable character, propelled by an array of
computer techniques. - BFI
