John Smith: The Man Making Film

"In The Girl Chewing Gum a commanding voice over appears to direct the action in a busy London street.

In The Black Tower we enter the world of a man haunted by a tower which, he believes, is following him around London.

Short fragments from Boris Johnson’s speeches relating to coronavirus with views of the London skyline from filmmaker’s window during the first English lockdown.

Covid Messages is a video in six parts, based around broadcasts of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s COVID-19 press conferences.

Taking glassmaking processes and history as its central themes, Slow Glass explores ideas about memory, perception and the constancy of change.

"A wonderfully witty example of how to conduct pillow talk with a small amphibian." Elaine Paterson, Time Out

Satirical exploration of the origins of humour that moves between the absurd and the deadly serious, revealing the dark as well as the light side of jokes.

The discovery of a VHS tape of his work on eBay leads the filmmaker to speculate obsessively about the seller's identity.

Dad’s Stick features three well-used objects that were shown to the artist by his father shortly before he died.

Enigmatic diagrams and the artist’s poor hearing on a flight to Ireland trigger a radical interpretation of the airline’s safety instructions.

A larger than life portrait of Queen Elizabeth II’s late husband, Prince Philip, His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh. It was filmed at the University of East London in 2002 and completed on the day of Philip’s death, April 9th 2021.

The dual subjects are the inhabitants of tower blocks in Hackney and the components and conventions of filmmaking.

Blight was made in collaboration with the composer Jocelyn Pook. It revolves around the building of the M11 Link Road in East London, which provoked a long and bitter campaign by local residents to protect their homes from demolition.

Made by deliberately misusing a language translator app on a smartphone, Steve Hates Fish interprets the signage and architecture in a busy London street.

Images from magazines and newspaper colour supplements accompany a spoken text taken from Word Associations and Linguistic Theory by Herbert H Clark.

Close-up journey through a domestic landscape and a journey through memory. Playing upon ambiguity and the unseen, the tape uses physical details of the space to trigger fragmented verbal descriptions of associated memories

Fragments of audio tape found on the streets of London, combining the sound retrieved from each piece of tape with images of the place where it was found.

Worst Case Scenario is constructed from hundreds of still photographs depicting daily life on a Viennese street corner.

Made over six years in the hotels of six different countries, Hotel Diaries charts the 'War on Terror' era of Bush and Blair through a seven-part series of video recordings that relate personal experiences to the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel/Palestine.

A view across the border in Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus.