Portals

Premiering as part of Last Friday’s Folkestone and for one week only the latest in our series of Mini Documentary commissions for ‘TWF’ This Week in Folkestone – a new digital countercultural archive with the work of local filmmaker, Ewan Golder.
Born and raised in a small town on the Romney Marsh, Ewan Golder’s latest work – ‘Portals’ – is a poetic film about the forgotten doors that have been bricked up or sealed, no longer fit to serve their function as an access portal to a realm now forgotten. It’s also about a certain sense of intrigue, of the wonder that lies behind every façade.
Why were these doors sealed up? What happens inside these hidden spaces? Who lives behind the bricked up doors? Through interviews conducted remotely with locals of Folkestone during the ‘Lockdown’, in ‘Portals’ we hear the voices of people who are confined to their own intimate personal spaces, as they reflect on their lives, their loves, and their longings, telling personal stories, recounting memories, dreams, and reflections on the experience.
These hidden personas inhabit an atemporal, hidden world, lost and forgotten behind the door, all the while the world carries on oblivious to their existence – yet they are still somehow connected with each other. Time runs at a different pace for them and through their common isolation we hope to find their common humanity, and perhaps somehow breathe new life into these neglected sites of our everyday landscape.
Currently working in Folkestone and Paris, Golder has always been equally preoccupied by the uncanny, the macabre and the absurd, and the delicate, the graceful and the transcendent. Completing a postgraduate programme at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in 2017, his most recent short films have explored the connection between dreams, technology and romance, alcoholism, homelessness and Alzheimer’s disease.
‘TWF’ (This Week In Folkestone) is a new archival project charting contemporary countercultures from the margins: experiences and creative expressions of people who have been left outside of the dominant cultural radar. ‘TWF’ is interested in all that is underground, underrated, and absent, putting a spotlight on diverse cultures that are under threat of disappearing due to patterns of urban morphology, economic, social & political structural changes, as well as the developing tastes, behaviours, influences and values of our time. ⁠As part of the project, we are presenting a series of six new mini documentary projects by artists with a vision for all that is left behind, invisible and emerging.