The screening on Friday the 27th of September was followed by a Q&A with director Xiaolu Guo and editor and sound designer Philippe Ciompi. Hosted by Presented in partnership with UCL Urban Laboratory.
After delivering a sell-out ‘Cities Imaginaries’ lecture with Waterstones and Urban Lab this summer, we’re excited to invite Xiaolu Guo back to revisit her extraordinary earlier work as a filmmaker.
Introduced by a Warhol-esque newsreader, Late at Night presents the voices of a number of Londoners – street gangsters, beggars, working class heroes, bankers and preachers – most of them excluded from the society and the area they live in, the newly gentrified London East End. Their anguished words build a network of responses to the hyper capitalist world we live in.
George Orwell wrote: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.” Xiaolu Guo’s film essay focuses on Britain’s mean streets and its dwellers, each fighting their ground in their own way. The filmmaker uses quotes, archives and media materials to construct an image of contemporary Britain and leads us to question our future under the institutional madness of global capitalism.
The screening on Friday the 27th of September was followed by a Q&A with director Xiaolu Guo and editor and sound designer Philippe Ciompi. Hosted by Presented in partnership with UCL Urban Laboratory.
In Memory of Mark Fisher (1968-2017), author of Capitalist Realism.