Rachel Ashton

Crossing the Bar (2025) is a cinematic portrait of the Baßgeige in Braunschweig, one of the oldest jazz bars in Germany. At the film’s center is a one-time performance of Tennessee Williams’s 1944 play The Glass Menagerie. The production transforms the bar’s interior, full of objects and anecdotes, into a stage; the artist and the regular guests embody the play’s various characters, whose personalities, lives, and interpersonal dynamics at times mirror their own. The play, the bar, and the film all witness the interweaving of several layers of reality and fiction, of memory and nostalgia. In this constant shifting between observation and performance, the film captures the emotional landscapes and social relationships within these spaces of interaction. It is a portrait not only of a place, but of the people who inhabit and shape it.

‘I have a great fear of seeing people when they don't know they're being observed, and finding out things about them I'd be happier not knowing! But for Tony a view has a kind of spiritual significance, not as something you describe or talk about but as something you live in correspondence with, so that it looks back at you and incorporates itself in everything you do. I watch him pause when he's cutting wood or digging over the vegetables and lift his eyes to the marsh for a while, and then go back to what he's doing; and so we eat the marsh along with our vegetables, and warm ourselves with it in our fires in the evening.’ - Rachel Cusk, Second Place
Rauch is a video installation that’s central focus is on the Rauch Club situated in Wiesen. Through interviews and enactments that are combined with footage of Wiesen that depicts the past, present and future of the club. Rauch aims thus to reinterpret a rural area to find oblique resonances between the contents of the dreams and the history and habitus of the people who experience them.

‘Living Too Late’ is a documentary set in a small seaside village in Wales called Borth. The film follows the life of a local man called Ted as he embarks on a journey to save his friend Graham from his own self-destructive ways. Ted and Graham’s story unfolds in the shadow of Borth’s Peat Bog, which acts as a natural carbon sink and is under threat from rising sea levels. The film depicts the realities of life and escaping from it through the promises of dreams and the only seemingly help of booze. It is through the unconventional friendship between Ted and Graham, born from a love of post-punk music and drinking, that ‘Living Too Late’ explores the problem of aging when you don’t want to. The film encapsulates the feeling of what it means to get out of a society that never accepted differences and how to form community in the most unlikely places.