Donut/Phalanx acts as a footnote to a film as yet unmade, involving four years of conversations and film experiments with Black and POC women affected by incarceration. The uniquely drab landscape of the counties that surround London hold a particular horror as nondescript semi-urban vistas give way to a partially derelict business park, where the United Kingdom’s only women’s immigration detention center, Yarl’s Wood, is sited. As a precursor toward a future work, this short film offers an embodied mapping of carceral geography, probing the green belt as the terrain through which punitive state technologies both suspend and set time and space in accelerated motion.

Specs
UK, 2021, Colour, Stereo, 16:9.
Original format: 16mm film / 2K Video.

Camera/edit/sound Rehana Zaman. Second 16mm camera/sound Lucy Parker. Colour Jason R. Moffat. Sound design Gisou Golshani. Sound mix Adam Bainbridge. Film processing Cinelab. Film telecine James Holcombe. Commissioned by ICA Miami.