** A conversation with filmmaker Huw Wahl and featured poet Stephen Watts accompanies this screening! **

** Northwest premiere! Co-presented with Interbay Cinema Society **

“Filmmaker Huw Wahl has translated the text of Stephen Watts’ book-length prose poem Republic of Dogs/Republic of Birds into a luminous feature-length documentary essay of remarkable beauty and spirited attention. The Republics moves from the early 1980s to the present, and from London’s Isle of Dogs and Scotland’s Western Isles – where Watts lived and worked as a shepherd in his youth – to the mountains of Northern Italy: at once a topographic journey and a highly personal meditation on history, memory, identity and belonging.

Anchored in Watts’s biography and lines, it nevertheless explores the larger truths of being and the calibrations of response to often hard-earned, lived experience. Considering the changing landscapes of settlement in London’s East End and Scottish islands, the destruction of working-class culture and an attendant sense of the collective, the film and its writing are themselves forms of cultural activism: elegy, celebration and a toolkit for ongoing resistance.”

– Gareth Evans, Moving Image Curator, Whitechapel Gallery

(Huw Wahl, UK, 2020, 83 min, shot on 16mm, in English, Italian & Scottish Gaelic w/ English subtitles)