Book tickets
While the Gods Were Busy with Another Child (2026) by Andrea Luka Zimmerman and All These Summers (2025) by Therese Henningsen + in conversation with Rachel Garfield.
“Why bother to close the distance with a stranger, when you can close the gate?” — Toni Morrison
This screening invites us to engage with cinema as a space of encounter - one that holds questions rather than seeking to answer them. The selected works explore how film can engage with trauma - personal and collective, spoken and unspoken - without reducing anyone to a single story. They ask us to reflect on thresholds between self and other, on response and responsibility, and on what it means to remain open to the unresolved.
Both filmmakers grew up with parents with significant mental health issues, manifesting throughout their childhoods in different ways and with a significant inheritance for each of them. Both films explore the subject in artistic and cinematic terms, and crucially, they embody their concerns, instead of telling them.
The films and conversation intervene in the recent turn in culture towards the ‘trauma plot’, a greedy devouring sense of ‘recovery’, proposing instead a less stable, more ambiguous exploration of traumatic events shaping us. Without defining, filmmaking becomes a means to reach across. Nurturing forms of making that resist fixed rules of process, form, or ethics, this program asks: what might it mean to engage without governing? To dwell with tension and discomfort rather than seek immediate resolution? To embrace risk and uncertainty - acknowledging the limits of our own understanding and the vulnerability inherent in the encounter?
While the Gods Were Busy with Another Child (25 mins, 2026)
This deeply exploratory work is drawn exclusively from the eclectic personal and public archive, in multiple formats, of Andrea’s life until their lasting estrangement from both parents, aged 30. Alternating between the playful, poetic and unsettling, While the Gods… collages together photographs, 16mm, VHS, interviews and diary entries in a process of profound and necessary self – and social interrogation. Unflinching in its presentation and analysis of a precarious and challenging working-class childhood and adolescence in 1970s Munich, nevertheless While the Gods… manifests an enduring and wayward spirit of resistance, seeding the possibility of living a life on one’s own terms.
All These Summers (65 mins, 2026)
Driven by a recurring urge to encounter strangers with her camera, the filmmaker begins to film her solitary Greek Cypriot neighbour Pete in the tower block in North London where they both live. Around the same time, her father in Denmark receives a cancer diagnosis requiring her to spend more time with him. As her father gradually slips back into the depression that made him absent when she was a teenager, she feels a need to document this transition. Her compulsion to enter into Pete’s life and to film him echoes with her desire for understanding her father’s experience of isolation and loneliness, as well as her own relationship to it. Filmed handheld and with an unwavering gaze, All These Summers asks questions about responsibility in life and in film whilst intimately confronting the complexities of the daughter-father and filmmaker-subject relationship.
The conversation will be recorded and transcribed for MIRAJ.
“Why bother to close the distance with a stranger, when you can close the gate?” — Toni Morrison
This screening invites us to engage with cinema as a space of encounter - one that holds questions rather than seeking to answer them. The selected works explore how film can engage with trauma - personal and collective, spoken and unspoken - without reducing anyone to a single story. They ask us to reflect on thresholds between self and other, on response and responsibility, and on what it means to remain open to the unresolved.
Both filmmakers grew up with parents with significant mental health issues, manifesting throughout their childhoods in different ways and with a significant inheritance for each of them. Both films explore the subject in artistic and cinematic terms, and crucially, they embody their concerns, instead of telling them.
The films and conversation intervene in the recent turn in culture towards the ‘trauma plot’, a greedy devouring sense of ‘recovery’, proposing instead a less stable, more ambiguous exploration of traumatic events shaping us. Without defining, filmmaking becomes a means to reach across. Nurturing forms of making that resist fixed rules of process, form, or ethics, this program asks: what might it mean to engage without governing? To dwell with tension and discomfort rather than seek immediate resolution? To embrace risk and uncertainty - acknowledging the limits of our own understanding and the vulnerability inherent in the encounter?
While the Gods Were Busy with Another Child (25 mins, 2026)
This deeply exploratory work is drawn exclusively from the eclectic personal and public archive, in multiple formats, of Andrea’s life until their lasting estrangement from both parents, aged 30. Alternating between the playful, poetic and unsettling, While the Gods… collages together photographs, 16mm, VHS, interviews and diary entries in a process of profound and necessary self – and social interrogation. Unflinching in its presentation and analysis of a precarious and challenging working-class childhood and adolescence in 1970s Munich, nevertheless While the Gods… manifests an enduring and wayward spirit of resistance, seeding the possibility of living a life on one’s own terms.
All These Summers (65 mins, 2026)
Driven by a recurring urge to encounter strangers with her camera, the filmmaker begins to film her solitary Greek Cypriot neighbour Pete in the tower block in North London where they both live. Around the same time, her father in Denmark receives a cancer diagnosis requiring her to spend more time with him. As her father gradually slips back into the depression that made him absent when she was a teenager, she feels a need to document this transition. Her compulsion to enter into Pete’s life and to film him echoes with her desire for understanding her father’s experience of isolation and loneliness, as well as her own relationship to it. Filmed handheld and with an unwavering gaze, All These Summers asks questions about responsibility in life and in film whilst intimately confronting the complexities of the daughter-father and filmmaker-subject relationship.
The conversation will be recorded and transcribed for MIRAJ.
Rachel Garfield is an artist and my work is engaged in portraiture in film and video. She have a background in painting which also feeds into the concerns of the moving image work, that of the role of lived relations in the formation and intersections of subjectivities.
Andrea Luka Zimmerman is a Jarman Award-winning artist and filmmaker whose multilayered practice has been described as Intuitive Cinema. It embodies and explores fragile refusals and counter memories, and itinerant lives, human and otherwise, in relation to structural and political injustice.
Therese Henningsen is a filmmaker based in London. Her filmmaking often finds its shape through the encounter with the person(s) filmed and the direction this takes. Her films include All These Summers (2025), After Time (2023), Slow Delay (2018), Baby Jesus and Maintenancer (2023 and 2018, with Sidsel Meineche Hansen). She has co-edited the anthology Strangers Within: Documentary as Encounter (2022), with Juliette Joffé. She is a member of Terrassen, a roving cinema in Copenhagen engaging with the social life of film, and is a co-founder of Sharna Pax, a film collective based in London/Copenhagen. She is a mentor on MA DocFiction at UCL and on MA Performance: Screen at Central Saint Martins, and facilitates the Open City Docs short course Documentary as Encounter and the CPH DOX Academy Hybrid Class. She is working on a practice-led PhD in Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Andrea Luka Zimmerman is a Jarman Award-winning artist and filmmaker whose multilayered practice has been described as Intuitive Cinema. It embodies and explores fragile refusals and counter memories, and itinerant lives, human and otherwise, in relation to structural and political injustice.
Therese Henningsen is a filmmaker based in London. Her filmmaking often finds its shape through the encounter with the person(s) filmed and the direction this takes. Her films include All These Summers (2025), After Time (2023), Slow Delay (2018), Baby Jesus and Maintenancer (2023 and 2018, with Sidsel Meineche Hansen). She has co-edited the anthology Strangers Within: Documentary as Encounter (2022), with Juliette Joffé. She is a member of Terrassen, a roving cinema in Copenhagen engaging with the social life of film, and is a co-founder of Sharna Pax, a film collective based in London/Copenhagen. She is a mentor on MA DocFiction at UCL and on MA Performance: Screen at Central Saint Martins, and facilitates the Open City Docs short course Documentary as Encounter and the CPH DOX Academy Hybrid Class. She is working on a practice-led PhD in Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Book tickets
Sat, 13 Jun 2026
Cinema 1
08:00 pm
Ticket information
- All tickets that do not require ID (full price, disabled, income support) can be printed at home or stored in email
- For aged-based concession tickets (under 25, student) please bring relevant ID to collect at the front desk before the event.
Access information
Cinema 1
- Both our Cinemas have step free access from The Mall and are accessible by ramp
- We have 1 wheelchair allocated space with a seat for a companion
- All seats are hard back, have a crushed velvet feel and they do not recline
- These are our seat size dimensions: W 42 x D 45 x H 52
- Arm rest either side of the seat dimensions: L 27 x W 7 x H 20
for the following requirements:
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All films are ad-free and 18+ unless otherwise stated, and start with a 10 min. curated selection of trailers.
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