Atlantropa

ATLANTROPA

COLLABORATION

ESPERI

FALLING LEAVES

The visual language established in Stevens' work presents the audience with critical yet often poetic forms in film, video and photography. Recurrent themes connect visual codes of landscape, borders and migration with more orthodox forms of documentation and reportage such as journalism and political dogma.

His short films have been exhibited internationally including the Whitechapel Gallery, 10th Istanbul Biennial, Tapei Museum of Modern Art, Serpentine Cinema, OVNI, Barcelona and Frieze film. His most recent film Atlantropa commissioned by Film London won Best False Fiction Jury Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival 2010. Stevens has also contributed to various publications such as Fresh Moves (Thames & Hudson) and Eight Metaphors (Lux) and has published two limited DVD/Book sets When I Sit Down to Write and Three Films on Language.

samuel Stevens, Atlantropa, 2009 (film still)

Atlantropa, 19'15, HD, 2009

Atlantropa is set in an imagined present centred on a bridge spanning the Straits of Gibraltar. Originally intended as a symbol of unity between Africa and Europe, following its closure, the bridge is acquisitioned by EU forces and takes on a whole different meaning.
A science fiction travelogue, Atlantropa mixes fact and fiction by relating the bridge to contemporary news reports and a modernist architect’s vision to dam the Straits and create a new continent from which the film takes its name. Having first been mentioned in science fiction by Arthur C. Clarke the Gibraltar Bridge has more recently been investigated as an actual possibility by the United Nations.

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Winner of the Ann Arbor Film Festival False Fiction Award, 2010