A film by the Derek Jarman Lab
What if every thought was a movement, and every movement a thought? What is intelligence and when is it artificial? Can robots dance? Can they help our children learn how to be? How are we learning, and do we ever stop? What are the values and skills that we pass on as societies through games, crafts, stories and cinema?
Connecting scenes of pedagogy, work and play in four global sites, The Hexagonal Hive and a Mouse in a Maze invites viewers to consider the mechanics of learning. We search in the cabinets of a supercomputer, in the curve of a chalked letter, in the weaving of a basket. We jump down the rabbithole and seek counsel from researchers and public intellectuals.
Curiosity and the affordances of the essay form send us grazing, observing, and thinking through film with an open heart. In The Hexagonal Hive and a Mouse in a Maze, we wonder afresh what the human spirit might yet dream up as new and improved programming for our species.
Anita Afonu
director, West Africa
Anita is a documentary filmmaker based in Ghana whose work explores the hidden histories and everyday lives of people in West Africa. She earned her BFA from the National Film and Television Institute, NAFTI in 2010.
Anita has produced and directed work for the Culturescapes, International Fund for Agricultural Development, the MacArthur Foundation and has served as jury member at the SunnySide of the Doc Film Market. Her films include Perished Diamonds (2012), The Burning Field (2018) and Weaving Knowledge (2022). She is an alumna of The Berlinale Talent Campus and the Durban Talent Campus.
Anita is part of a new generation of African artists who are creatively reckoning with their nations’ pasts in order to understand the political and social realities of the present. She has a deep interest in the film archives of Ghana and has advocated for the repatriation of Ghana’s Film Archives.
Ahsan Akbar
executive producer
Ahsan is a writer, entrepreneur, and socio-cultural organiser. He is a founder-director of the Dhaka Literary Festival. His critically acclaimed debut poetry collection, The Devil’s Thumbprint, is taught at SOAS University of London. He guest-edited special issues for Granta, Wasafiri and Tank. He has written extensively for various publications, including The Guardian, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Scroll, Ambit, Telegraph India, and The Spectator. He is the founder of Symmetry Productions, a creative agency for artists in London. Akbar is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Rosa Beiroa
Animation
Rosa is an award-winning filmmaker, artist, and animator based in London and a co-founder and director at Made Abroad.
With a background in Fine Arts and a passion for drawing, her work explores movement and gesture through the representation of the female figure. Her short film, “in our skin”, has achieved international screenings and awards, including Best Animation, Best Experimental, Audience, Jury, and Best European Short awards.
She currently works as a freelance animator on advertising campaigns, documentaries, and television series. Since 2020, she has been a visiting lecturer at the MA Animation at the University of the Arts London and has conducted sessions at the NFTS and the University of Seville.
Eddie Bolger
Camera
Eddie is a filmmaker based in Berlin – he works across the fields of documentary, essay film and oral history, and specialises in projects which integrate filmmaking and research practices. Eddie has worked with the Derek Jarman Lab since 2016 where he has produced, among other films, the 2021 Wellcome Trust funded research film Rites Undone, an investigation into issues around intercultural psychiatry, which has screened at multiple mental health and human rights film festivals across Europe. His most recent short Last Days in Moers (2022) is a free-jazz-Christmas-
comedy documentary, which portraits improvising musicians in the town of Moers in North Rhine-Westphalia.
Eddie studied Cultural Studies at the London Consortium and English Literature at the University of Cambridge. He is a graduate of the Filmwerkstatt Münster’s Masterschool Dokumentarfilm.
Steve Cookman
sound mixer
Steve’s love of music helped start his career, joining ‘Odyssey’ studios in 1984 as an assistant sound engineer. He helped work on many 80’s bands, solo artists and orchestral scores, artists from Bananarama to Dave Gilmour to Andrew Lloyd Webber. He continued engineering, joining one of the first post-production houses in London, Videosonics, who were pioneers in many audio-post techniques. It was an interesting time in audio with the move into digital sampling and recording.
In 1991 Steve joined Molinare in Soho (which then comprised three radio and two dubbing suites) with the objective of increasing ‘drama’ and ‘high end’ broadcast work. After Molinare and a move to Telecine a few years later he set up his own post-production studio, Fusion Post Production, with former colleagues from Molinare. The company provided services for offline, online, audio and grading. In 2013 Steve headed out on his own and has been creating soundscapes for film and television ever since.
JP Davidson
colourist
JP is a filmmaker based in the south of England and director of boutique production and post production company Triptik Films. With nearly 30 years working in the film and television industry he divides his time between directing, editing and grading feature-length narrative and documentary projects.
JP began working for facilities in Soho, London, honing his skills before going freelance and setting up shop offering editing, grading and all aspects of finishing to the TV and film industry. He has gone on to single handedly make documentaries about government organisations, artists and sportsmen. He has provided his filmmaking services to a plethora of feature films and award-winning documentaries and is currently in pre-production for his latest feature due to be shot in October 2024.
JP’s eclectic career has resulted in credits in all aspects of film making, from developing thought-provoking documentaries, to writing and directing compelling features, to editing and grading carefully selected third-party projects.
Bartek Dziadosz
director
Bartek is a filmmaker and media lecturer. He works as the Director of the Derek Jarman Lab at Birkbeck, University of London. His first feature was The Trouble with Being Human These Days (2013), a hybrid documentary about Zygmunt Bauman and liquid modernity, followed by The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger (2016), which he directed together with Tilda Swinton, Colin MacCabe and Christopher Roth. Bartek‘s films explore a wide range of subjects, from the history of subliminal advertising (Nothing Exists Until You Sell It, 2021) to the portrayal of a Bakelite artefacts collector (The Plastic Phoenix, 2020).
He studied at the Jagiellonian University, Westminster Film School and the London Consortium. His PhD thesis was on the theories of editing, and he now teaches classes in cultural studies and media practice at Birkbeck and on the Pittsburgh-London Film Program.
Simon Fisher Turner
sound mixer
Simon started making film soundtracks for Derek Jarman with Caravaggio, continuing through to Blue. He’s composed for silent films, winning an Ivor Novello award for his soundtrack to The Epic of Everest. He has also composed film music for Mike Hodges, Michael Almareyda and Isao Yamada. His various collaborators over the years include, Ruicki Sakamoto, Gina Birch, Deux Filles and The Elysian Collective, and he created the music for several of the Derek Jarman Lab’s Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger (2016).
In 2020 Simon released A Quiet Corner in Time (Mute), his collaboration with the artist and author Edmund de Waal. This was followed in 2022 by A Quiet Corner in Time (Exquisite Corpse) remix project. He’s collaborated recently with filmmakers Daisy Dickenson (UK) and Kamal Aljafari (Palestine) on their new projects, and has an instrumental CD out shortly entitled, New Music for Political Documentaries. Simon’s new album, Instability of The Signal, will be released on 2 August 2024 on Mute, and his ongoing sonic blog Guerilla Audio releases regular missives via Touch every two weeks.
Lily Ford
producer
Lily is a filmmaker and historian based in London. She is a founder member of the Derek Jarman Lab at Birkbeck and produced the feature documentary The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger. She teaches history and filmmaking on the Pittsburgh-London Film Program, and makes research films in collaboration with other scholars, supported by grants from institutions such as the Wellcome Trust and the AHRC. Among her short films are Aerial Bodies, The Stuff that Screams are Made of and A Humbrol Art: The Paintings of George Shaw. Her 50-minute documentary Chasing the Revolution: Marie Langer, Psychoanalysis and Society brought together historians and psychoanalysts in Europe and Latin America to examine the life and work of the radical emigré analyst Marie Langer.
Lily studied at King’s College London, the London Consortium and Birkbeck. Her PhD was on the cultural impact of aerial photography in the 1920s. She’s written a book, articles and video essays on the history of flight and women in early aviation, and continues to be fascinated by how scholarly research and filmmaking can combine.
Colin MacCabe
executive producer
Colin is Distinguished Professor of English and Film at the University of Pittsburgh. He lectured at Cambridge University on the History of Modern and Early Modern English until 1981 when he became Professor of English Studies at Strathclyde University.
He started producing films in the early eighties and co-founded the Jarman Lab with Bartek Dziadosz and Paul Craddock in 2012 to investigate thinking with and in film. The University of Pittsburgh and Birkbeck, University of London provided institutional support.
His latest publications are Perpetual Carnival (OUP 2017) and Keywords for Today (edited with Holly Janacek (OUP 2019). His most recent released film (with Christopher Roth and the Jarman Lab) was The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger (2016). Both the Lab’s Hexagonal Hive and a Mouse in a Maze (directors Bartek Dziadosz and Tilda Swinton, 2024) and Endless Europe (director Christopher Roth 2022) are direct successors of the Berger film and, like the Berger film, were funded by Vijay Vaidyanathan and Adam Bartos.
Bea Moyes
sound/production
Bea is a producer working with documentary film, audio production and oral history, in collaboration with academic researchers, archival collections and community groups. Bea has worked with the Derek Jarman Lab since 2014 on projects including The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger, Crafting Resistance: The Art of Chilean Political Prisoners, and several films in in partnership with Kew Archives and Herbarium, Birkbeck College and participants’ groups from Brazil. Her film and audio work includes Las Piedras, a film made with conservation groups in Peru; My Choice, with midwives in France; and collaborations with On-the-Record including an audio tour for ‘A Hackney Autobiography’. She led the oral history project ‘Working River: A Living History of London’s Boatyards’, with Thames Festival Trust.
Bea studied for a Masters in Research at the London Consortium, has a PGCert in Archive Management, and trained in archive film handling and programming with London’s Screen Archives. Bea is an Associate Lecturer in the Department of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication at Birkbeck College.
Alita Serra
design and animation
Alita is an award-winning designer and animator and also director at Made Abroad. For the last 10 years, she has worked as a visual and motion designer for different creative agencies in London and also acts as a visiting lecturer at the MA Animation course at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London since 2016.
She studied design at the University of Buenos Aires and Animation at UAL.
Alita’s work was published as one winner of the D&AD awards in the branding category and also was the winner, and one of the judges’ picks, for the best Comprehensive Identity Programme Brand New Awards for the creation of Peru’s new country identity system.
Tilda Swinton
director
Tilda started making films with the director Derek Jarman in 1985 with Caravaggio. She and Jarman made seven more films together, including Edward II (for which she won the Best Actress award at the 1991 Venice International Film Festival). She gained wider international recognition in 1992 with her portrayal of Orlando, based on the novel by Virginia Woolf under the direction of Sally Potter. She has established rewarding ongoing filmmaking relationships with Jim Jarmusch, Joel and Ethan Coen, Lynne Ramsay, Luca Guadagnino, Joanna Hogg and Bong Joon Ho. She received both the BAFTA and Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress of 2008 for Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton. In 2020, she was the recipient of a BFI Fellowship and a Leon d’Oro at the Venice film festival for her lifetime’s work. Recent films include Three Thousand Years Of Longing, Asteroid City and The Eternal Daughter. In 2022 she shot The End with Joshua Oppenheimer.
Tilda has been part of the Derek Jarman Lab for over a decade. She instigated, wrote and directed part of the feature documentary The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger (2016).
Tilda is the mother of twins and lives in the Highlands of Scotland.
Vijay Vaidyanathan
producer
Vijay is an Emmy nominated producer with a wide and distinguished background in documentary film and the arts. Vijay’s independent executive producing credits include several multiple-award winning films and Television series that have enjoyed wide recognition in commercial release as well as at film festivals across the world including Berlinale, HotDocs Toronto, the Sundance Film Festival, the Telluride Film Festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival. His credits include the Emmy Award-nominated Meet the Patels (2014), Point and Shoot (2014), An Honest Liar (2014), The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger (2016), Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds (2020), The Lost Leonardo (2021), Merkel (2022), Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer (2022), The Lincoln Project (2022) and While We Watched (2022) which won the Peabody Award in 2024.
