Bringing together, animation, documentary and video art, this screening presents three short artist films exploring recovery.

Cert- TBC

Three acclaimed artist films offer new perspectives on simply being.

Artist film has the unique ability to hold the complexity of substance use, recovery and mental health without reducing lived and living experience to a singular story. With image, sound, and form it allows us to step into experiences beyond our own, opening spaces for relational attention and dialogue.

Bringing together, animation, documentary and video art, this screening presents three acclaimed short artist films from the UK and USA for the first time in a shared programme. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion exploring how moving image can represent substance use, recovery and mental health with clarity, complexity and care.

Collectively, the programme asks what moving image can make possible when recovery is approached not as a resolved outcome, but as a lived process shaped by memory, ambiguity and social connection. The films do not offer art as remedy; instead, they invite a shared encounter with the visual language, ruptures and repetitions by which recovery is lived and re-imagined.

About the films:

Small Hours: A Portrait of Alcoholism (Dir: Oscar Wyndham Lewis, 2025)

This award-winning short animation traces the grip of alcohol dependence and the fragile possibility of human connection. Centred on a reclusive artist whose life has been hollowed out by drinking, the film uses animation to move between isolation, compulsion and the tentative reach towards another person. Narrated by actor Robert Bathurst (Downton Abbey, Cold Feet, Toast of London) it has recently screened at Raindance Film Festival and the Oscar-qualifying In the Palace International Short Film Festival.

There Is No One What Will Take Care of You (Dir: Dina Fiasconaro, 2023)

Making its UK debut, this split screen video artwork explores the relationship between a father, daughter and friend whose lives are tragically marked by substance use, loss and emotional transformation. The film holds these relationships in tension rather than resolving them, allowing proximity, absence and responsibility to unfold across the screen. This project is the recipient of a Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund grant and has screened at the Maryland Film Festival and Zo Gallery, Baltimore.

Milk (Dir: Miranda Stern, 2024)

This BAFTA-nominated short documentary explores a raw and intimate portrayal of maternal loss and heroin use. The film follows director Miranda Stern as she embarks on an introspective quest to understand the mother she never knew, while navigating her own history of substance use. Drawing on connections between the brain's opioid receptors and the nurturing comfort of breast milk, Milk blends documentary, archival footage and mixed-media aesthetics to consider personal testimony and embodied memory.

About the artists:

Oscar Wyndham Lewis is an artist and animator based in Margate. Since graduating from the Royal College of Art with a Master's in Animation in 2016, he has since directed several award-winning short films and music video projects. His debut hand-painted film The Waves won the Scottish Mental Health Arts Prize and was shortlisted for a BAFTA in 2017.

Dina Fiasconaro is a Baltimore screenwriter and director whose work centres female characters and explores addiction and recovery, marginalisation, familial relationships and mental illness. She is a Professor of Film and Moving Image at Stevenson University, and her work has been screened at a variety of national and international venues and film festivals, including the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Miranda Stern is a Glasgow-based writer/director. A graduate of the National Film and Television School (NFTS), Milk garnered a BAFTA nomination for Best Short Film in 2025. During its festival run including Clermont-Ferrand, Aesthetica, Palm Springs and EIFF the film caught the attention of the New York Times and now features on their Op-Docs platform.

Through exhibitions, performances and creative events, Recoverist Month places the arts at the centre of conversations on substance use and recovery. Held every September to mark International Recovery Month, this annual programme brings artists, communities and audiences together across venues around the UK, making a vibrant contribution to the contemporary cultural landscape.

Description supplied by the event organiser.