Michael O’Pray Prize

The Michael O’Pray Prize is a Film and Video Umbrella initiative launched in 2017 in partnership with Art Monthly, supported by University of East London and Arts Council England. The prize seeks new writing on innovation and experimentation in moving-image art. Read the winning texts below.

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One must have blind faith in ideology

Ricardo Reverón Blanco on a Cuban filmmaker suppressed both at home and abroad

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Opensecret

Emily Morley examines a new mode of distributed filmmaking

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Communist Dislocations

Oliver Dixon revisits the work of experimental documentary filmmakers

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Not to Scale

Bami Oke examines Garrett Bradley’s embodied video reflection on US culture

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The Screen is a Drum

E De Zulueta explores the delirious resistance of Mexican filmmakers Colectivo los ingrávidos

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Looking at Palestine

Nevan Spier views Palestine through the films of Mustafa Abu Ali and Elia Suleiman

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Excavating the Body

Natasha Thembiso Ruwona explores Ashanti Harris’s Black Gold

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Queer Territories/Lesbian Lenses

Aislinn Evans critically examines a lesbian relation to histories of the land and landscape cinema

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Dreaming Rivers

Leena Habiballa considers the physical reworking of a pioneering film’s 16mm print

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In Defence of the Small Screen

Laura Bivolaru on viewing the moving image while moving

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I Am a Photograph

Evelyn Wh-ell examines two French trans icons’ focus on image as surface

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Going on a Bear Hunt

Dan Guthrie tries to imagine the experience of an elusive artwork

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Robert Beavers

Siavash Minoukadeh on the power of oblique suggestion in queer cinema

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Blank Space

Ronnie Angel Pope enters a cinematic void

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Danielle Dean

Rosa Tyhurst on Danielle Dean’s subverting of the vampiric strategies at work in brand marketing

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Out in the Open

Sara Quattrocchi Febles explores how a film can no longer be fixed in time and place when screened outdoors

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Alberta Whittle: RESET

Harvey Dimond explores the historical resonances of this slavery-referencing artwork made during a suffocating pandemic

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Together, Alone: Watching Sandra Lahire in Lockdown

Rachel Pronger discovers in earlier experimental films a familiar tension between the social being and the individual body

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Lutz Mommartz’s Own Private Idyll

Mimi Howard finds that there are oblique ways to engage with tumultuous times

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Image Abrasion

Cassandre Greenberg considers Derek Jarman’s Blue as a celluloid artefact in an age of portable digital media

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Patrick Staff: On Venus

Laura Jacobs on hostile environments, both social and natural, in Patrick Staff’s ‘On Venus’ exhibition

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Bank – Basement – Becker

Adam Hines-Green on the expression of horror through both fiction and reality in the LA video art of Julie Becker

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A Long Shot

Dan Ward on artists’s attempts to slow the viewer

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Heat Sensitive?

Lauren Houlton on Richard Mosse’s ‘Incoming’

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