SAT SEPT 6 -
SUN SEPT 7
2025
Elevation is a celebration of experimental film and artists’ moving image from around the world.
In our second edition, we'll be screening over 55 films, installations and expanded cinema performances from 14 countries over one weekend, including a dedicated programme for filmmakers based in Cornwall and Devon.
All screenings are at Patchwork Studios, with additional installations in studio spaces in the historic Barrack Block at Maker Heights.
Our screening programme runs Saturday 6th Sept 11am – 7.30pm and Sunday 7th 11am – 7.30pm, with after-party DJs and drinks in Garrison Gallery. Screening programmes are at 11am, 2pm, 4pm, 6pm each day. The day-by-day schedule of screenings is below. For full details about all the films showing in each screening programme, please click on the ‘Full programme details’ link beneath each listing.
You can book tickets for all events here.
SCHEDULE
Wednesday 3rd – Friday 5th September 2025
Elevation Handmade Film Workshop | 10:00–16:00 each day
(Final screening at Elevation Film Festival on Sunday 7th September)
Location: Notch Studio / Patchwork Studios, Maker Heights, Cornwall
Step into the unexpected with Notch Studios and Elevation Film Festival at Maker Heights - a place where creativity runs wild and mistakes are part of the magic.
Over three immersive days, this hands-on, collaborative workshop invites you to dive into the world of experimental filmmaking, working with Bolex film cameras, analog film and hand processing the results. Whether you're a curious beginner or a seasoned creative, you'll be encouraged to play, explore, and push boundaries — no pressure, no perfection, just pure artistic discovery.
Ticket Price: £20 for the full 3-day workshop experience.
Friday 5th September: Opening Party
17:00 - Late | Opening Party | DJ: Leon Frey
Garrison Gallery
Enjoy an evening of great music, atmospheric film projections, and delicious cocktails. Mingle with local artists and workshop participants as we celebrate the creativity and collaboration that’s gone into making a film in just three days.
Free entry, unticketed event.
Saturday 6th September
All Day Sat 6th September
10:30 - 18:00 | Celluloid Dream Path | Leyla Rodriguez | Argentina
Moving Image Installation | 30 min, looped
Room 1 | Barrack Block
In her short films, Leyla Rodriguez comes up with many-layered sequences on identity. In many cases, penetrating mises-en-scène are assembled, creating the character of dynamic collages. Ahistorical, multiply ambiguous, symbolically charged images suggest narratives that are not redeemed.
Free entry, unticketed event.
All weekend Sat 6th - Sun 7th September
10:30 - 18:00 | May the earth lie light upon thee (Work In Progress) | Bryony Gillard | UK
Moving Image Installation
Studio 16 | Rame Projects space
(Please note that this venue is upstairs)
May the earth lie light upon thee is a new moving image work by artist Bryony Gillard (bryonygillard.co.uk), developed during a residency with Rame Projects. Filmed in Ford Park Cemetery in Plymouth, the piece explores ideas of presence, attention, and care within landscapes shaped by loss. Following the cemetery’s dedicated team of groundskeepers, the footage reveals the labour involved in tending to the dead and the many entangled lives that share the cemetery grounds. Rooted in deep listening and collaborative sound-making, the work invites a more-than-human perspective on time and memory. This presentation is an early-stage installation, offering a glimpse into the evolving process.
There will be an In Conversation event with Bryony Gillard & Lucy Elmes at Rame Projects / Studio 16 on Saturday 6th 13:00–13:30
Free entry, unticketed event.
Saturday 6th September: Screenings
11:00 - 12:30 | If the Light Had a Skin | 1hr 4min
International short films
This programme is a luminous meditation on summer’s rhythms, where sunlight becomes both subject and collaborator. Sensorial intimacies and tenderness of remembered moments are weaved into a study of relationships through interactions with nature and light.
Films by: Billy Palumbo | Sasha Waters | Eve Le Fessant Coussonneau | Jeff Sermon | Rita Tse | Jonathan Onsuwan Johnson, Carleen Maur | Kathleen Rugh | stephanie barber
Saturday 6th September: In person event
13:00 - 13:30 | May the earth lie light upon thee (Work In Progress) | Bryony Gillard | UK
In Conversation Event
Bryony Gillard & Lucy Elmes at Rame Projects
A discursive introduction to Bryony's work in progress installation in Studio 16.
Free entry, unticketed event.
Saturday 6th September: Screenings
14:00 - 15:30 | Places Under the Lemonade Sea | 1h 19m
International short films
Historical, imagined, and re-imagined landscapes meet in this programme across sites of ruins, relics, and archival echoes that speak to both utopian dreams and colonial wounds. Interactions of memory and place are challenged through experimental forms and layered narratives.
Films by: Benjamin Balcom | Panu Johansson | Nataliya Bek-Gergard | Crimson DM Lily | Justin Clifford Rhody | Mahdi Fleifel | Sasha Waters | Roland Cartagena | Teri Carson | Felipe Esparza Perez
Saturday 6th September: Screenings
16:00 - 17:30 | The Moss Gets Louder in the Rain | 1h 27m plus Director Q&A
International short films
A poetic and sensory exploration of the delicate interplay between humans and the natural world. Through rain-soaked landscapes, fog-bound coastlines, and moss-covered wetlands, these films draw on possibilities of reciprocal ecology and embodied perception.
Films by: Dagie Brundert | Nora Zubizarreta La Fille Renne | MilleFeuille (aka MiruFiyu) | Mireille Heidbreder | Helka Heinonen | Vasilios Papaioannu | Nick Jordan | Patrycja Loranc, Sam Johnson
Saturday 6th September: Live Event
18:00 - 19:00 | Searching Erskine: a performance by Arun Sood, William Kemp, and Alastair Smith
Expanded Cinema Performance
Arun Sood and musical collaborators Willam Kemp (violin) and Alastair Smith (electronics) perform a live version of Searching Erskine: an audio-visual response to the tidal island of Vallay in the Outer Hebrides. Originally released as a 12-track album with accompanying moving-image works, this performance experiments with field recordings from the island combined with archival samples, spoken word, and live improvisations. Vallay has been uninhabited by humans since the early twentieth century, and Arun's grandmother was one of the last islanders to leave. Blurring the boundaries between ambient, experimental folk, and electronica, Searching Erskine explores the intersections between sound, memory, ancestry and ecology.
Arun Sood is a Scottish-Indian writer, musician, artist, and academic. Through words, music, moving-image and collage, his works explore cultural memory, diasporic identities, song cultures, and the intersections between personal heritage, colonial histories, and climate futures.
Image: Tamas Kovacs (@tomkov-photo)
Saturday 6th September: Evening
19:00 - Late | DJ : Bisco
Garrison Gallery
Enjoy an evening of great music, atmospheric film projections, and delicious cocktails.
Free entry, unticketed event.
Sun 7th September
All Day Sun 7th September
10:30 - 18:00 | Algae and Tufa, will you be more successful than me? | Kate Paxman | UK
Moving Image Installation | 6 min, looped
Room 1 | Barrack Block
Algae and Tufa, will you be more successful than me?' (2019–2025) is an immersive film and sound installation. Its projected, circular image is both planetary and microscopic – a macrocosmic event and a miasmic, microcosmic vision exposing layers of environmental damage at local sites of historic fossil carbon industry. Proposed as ‘remote witnessing technology’, …will you be?... transcribes the material conditions of site into tainted atmospheres and describes both toxicity and resilience across more-than-human communities.
Free entry, unticketed event.
Sunday 7th September: Screenings
11:00 - 12:30 | What the Body Knows | 1h 18m plus Director Q&A
International short films
Own body, foreign body — a meditation on perception and the shifting boundaries between body and mind.These films explore how vulnerability deepens connection, weaving together themes of illness, grief, and identity.
Films by: Sarah Ballard | Caryn Cline | John Muse | Hogan Seidel | Jean-Francois Reverdy | Dominick Michael Rivers | Nicolás Onischuk | Eislow Johnson, Dominic Bonelli
Sunday 7th September: Screenings
14:00 - 15:30 | Useless Machines, Beautiful Failures | 1h plus Director Q&A
International short films
From chimeric dreamscapes to stop-motion phantasmagoria, this programme's animations meander through the surreal and fragmented terrain of contemporary life. The magic of transformation and the evolving human condition are explored through digital and analogue tools, producing vibrant rhythms, techno-dystopian futures, and kaleidoscopic meditations.
Films by: Marc Richter | Paul Tarragó | Shaun Clark | Chico Peres Smith | Runfeng Qiu | Meejin Hong | Guli Silberstein
Sunday 7th September: Screenings
16:00 - 17:30 | Wobbly Worlds | 1h 28m
International short films
Queer identities, raves, and altered states of the cinematic underbelly form a blurred exploration of fluctuating selfhood. Resilience, creativity, and bold intensity intertwine in this programme to celebrate ways of being in the world, as vulnerable as courageous.
Films by: Slawomir Milewski | Josh Weissbach | Patrycja Loranc | Hong Yane Wang | Alex Hetherington
Sunday 7th September: Screenings
18:00 - 19:30 | Light on the Grasslands: Celebrating Local Talent | 1h 20m plus Director Q&A
Films from Cornwall & Devon, all genres
Elevation Film Festival proudly champions homegrown talent. This programme highlights inspiring work from local creatives, bold, original, and rooted in our community. Come celebrate the voices shaping the future of film, right here at home.
Films by: Harry Faint | Lara Fullalove | Micha Colombo | Graham Guy-Robinson | Janine Rook | Richard Ashrowan | Notch Studio & Collaborators
Sunday 7th September: Evening
19:30 - Late | DJ : Chris D Stacey
Garrison Gallery
Enjoy an evening of great music, atmospheric film projections, and delicious cocktails. .
Free entry, unticketed event.
