Dispatches from Futureland

Household would like to invite you to a film screening of ‘Dispatches from Futureland’ by artist Sol Archer, in a pop-up cinema at the Mission to Seafarers in North Belfast’s historical Sailortown neighbourhood. The Digital Film Archive have curated a selection of local archive footage in response to the themes within ‘Dispatches from Futureland’ which will also be shown at the event.  

‘Dispatches from Futureland’, set in the near future, quietly explores the automatisation of the docklands in Rotterdam and the simultaneous growth in global trade and loss of local jobs. Rotterdam has the largest port in Europe, carrying five hundred millions tonnes of cargo per year, while employing the labour of only two thousand four hundred workers, a loss of nearly 200,000 jobs in the last 40 years. In the delta of the Maas river a huge area of new land is under construction to house fully automated terminals, removing human bodies from the corridors of transit. At the heart of the Maasvlakte is Futureland, a tourist visitor centre. This film is a situational study of the inhuman scale and constructed spectacle of international industrial sites, and the theatrical spectacle of unionised demonstration against it. 

Sol Archer (www.solarcher.co.uk) is currently working with Household (www.householdbelfast.co.uk) to make a film in Sailortown as part of the organisation’s long term artist-in-residence programme, ‘Vicinities’. 

Location: Mission to the Seafarers, Prince's Dock Street, Belfast

3pm-4:30pm Sunday 11th of August 
This event is FREE and refreshments will be provided.

This screening is part of the New Lodge Arts Festival and has been made possible with the support of Film Hub NI, Northern Ireland Screen Digital Film Archive and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.