Sci-Fi-London
You’ll find more outlandish science fiction ideas than you can fit in one human brain here, especially among the 70-plus shorts. But there’s some great non-fiction, too: opening documentary The Death Of Superman Lives: What Happened?, for instance, on the fabled Nicolas Cage/Tim Burton superhero movie that never was. If you’re after something fictional and further-fetched, how about a Hungarian nurse turned into a demon by the ghost of a Japanese crooner (Liza, The Fox Fairy, 6 Jun), or even less believable, a superhero from Peckham (Superbob, 7 Jun)?
Selected V, Nationwide
Venture one step further out of the mainstream with this selection of young artists’ films chosen by other artist film-makers – those nominated for the 2014 Jarman Award, to be precise. It’s a lucky dip showcase of names you’ve probably never heard of, but might in years to come (let’s not forget last year’s Turner prize went to a video artist, Duncan Campbell). Most of their works are impossible to describe in words, which is the way it should be, but you’ll find everything here from uncannily perfect computer-generated women (Kate Cooper’s Rigged) to bizarre self-help groups (Lucy Beech’s Cannibals) to attempts to lip-read Australian soap actors (Lucy Clout’s The Extra’s Ever-Moving Lips). Many of the artists will be appearing with this touring programme, which continues after Glasgow to galleries in Newcastle, Brighton, Nottingham and London.
CCA, Glasgow, Thu; various venues to 23 Jul
The Luna Cinema, Nationwide
The open-air cinema outfit embarks on its biggest season yet: 120 screenings, compared to 70 last year, taking place in public spaces such as parks, stately homes and castles from Exeter to Edinburgh and Battersea to Bournemouth. There are some new additions (Birdman, The Imitation Game, The Theory Of Everything, The Grand Budapest Hotel) to what’s become an established roster of common-denominator crowd-pleasers, such as Mamma Mia! and Top Gun, which play at Norfolk’s Holkham Hall this weekend to kick the season off. The tour really gets going in the summer months, and there are food and drink concessions at all screenings, with some venues even providing the option of a three-course meal inside converted vintage buses.
Laura Poitras, London
Documentary maker Poitras did a very good job of staying out of the spotlight until last year, when it emerged she was one of the handful of people trusted by whistleblower Edward Snowden, and then won the best documentary Oscar for her incisive insider account of the affair, Citzenfour. As the film revealed, Poitras was already on the radar of US Homeland Security by that stage, having probed equally unsavoury aspects of the “war on terror” in The Oath, about a conflicted al-Qaida member in Yemen and a prisoner in Guantánamo, and My Country, My Country, on a Sunni doctor in US-occupied Iraq. This a rare chance to see her 9/11 Trilogy, plus a Q&A with Poitras next Saturday.
