Saturday 24th October – 7:00pm doors, 7:30pm films start Tickets are £3 – or pay what you want – and are available on the link or pay on the night. Film + post screening pre-recorded director Q and A. Witch follows Writer and self-proclaimed witch, Andrea Hejlskov who made headlines when she took her family and left society to live off-grid in the Swedish woods. Ten years later, she returns to the city. Divorced, suffering from a writer’s block, and with her children having grown up, Andrea struggles to piece together her new existence. A process that is clouded by a sudden return of her Schizofrenia, that makes it difficult for her to distinguish between magical omens and pure symptoms. Witch spans over a 10 year period of protagonist Andrea Hejlskov’s life, including never before published footage from her life and time in the Swedish wilderness. It is a film about magic, nature, mental health, creation and all the pieces that constitute a modern human being. Director’s Statement on Witch / Heks – Emil Nørgaard Munk When I first met the film’s main character, Andrea Hejlskov, I felt she had access to something I, too, longed to perceive. She seemed to inhabit a world far richer and more animated than the one I moved through. For her, both city and forest were filled with communication—signs, sounds, synchronicities, and subtle connections. I want the film to mirror Andrea’s way of sensing the world. As she once explained to me: “While I sit here with you, I sense everything at once. I feel the worms in the soil, I hear the train arriving, I see melting glaciers, rising waters, I hear the trees talking, and the raven—there she comes again. My white bones are growling. Sometimes it is a pleasant experience, and often it is overwhelming.” To reduce this simply to symptoms of schizophrenia would be a mistake. Part of it belongs to Andrea’s animistic orientation: the belief that the Earth is alive, and that it speaks. The film explores the complex, layered identity of a woman who is at once an artist, a mother, someone living with mental illness, and a modern-day witch. It also examines the tension between life inside and outside society, and considers what role magic might play within contemporary debates about climate change, critiques of capitalism, and experiences of psychological suffering. Can magic exist within a sterile, soulless Northern European welfare state? And where do poetry, the symptoms of schizophrenia, and the world’s quiet enchantments meet?

Description supplied by the event organiser.