Showing at the ICA tomorrow night, and Saturday and Sunday afternoon, is multimedia artist Shezad Dawood’s debut feature film Piercing Brightness.
The plot? “Two youths land in a spaceship outside Preston. Their mission: to re-establish contact and affect the retrieval of the ‘Glorious 100’ sent to earth millennia ago in human form to study and observe the development of another race. After making contact with one of the 100, now a Pakistani shopkeeper (Bhasker Patel), they discover that many of their kind have become corrupted, forgetting their original purpose and slowly becoming influenced by and in turn influencing their adopted home… “
Piercing Brightness is one of the oddest, most unexpectedly delightful films that the Quietus has seen in some time, playing for all the world like a cross between 1960s TV staple The Invaders, an episode of Coronation Street and what the Ghost Box label would create if given cameras and access to weapons-grade psychotropics. Pushing it even further into the punting path of the Quietus is its original score, composed by Acid Mothers Temple’s Kawabata Makoto, and a trippy cameo appearance from part-time furry space beast/full-time wyrd cosmic folk wrangler Alexander Tucker. We can’t recommend this charming, original and really quite bonkers film enough.
After tomorrow night’s screening there will be a Q&A with Shezad Dawood followed by a DJing session from Tucker himself and Chris Bell. Tickets are £10/£8 concessions or £7 to ICA members and the screening starts at 7pm; for full details, head to the ICA’s website here.
