The City Remains : screening and talk by Jamie Stantonian 6.30pm | free entry / donation
“The City Remains is an experimental short film drawn from more than twenty years of dream journals, transforming Edinburgh into an immense psychic landscape: part memory, part myth, part living organism.
Here, familiar streets unfold into labyrinths, volcanic hills rise and fall with hidden emotional forces, and architecture is buried, excavated and rebuilt from the strata of personal and ancestral memory. Guided by strange messengers and forces older than reason, the film journeys through this reimagined city towards its hidden centre: a sacred heart where impossible landscapes emerge from the cosmic night of the psyche.
The film grew from recurring dreams of Edinburgh and trying, fruitlessly, to photograph these places on a smartphone before waking. Combining hand-drawn art direction, lyrical prompts, AI-generated imagery and animation, these new techniques give those elusive visions a visible form. A narrative shaped by an exploration of the dream journals through Jung’s writings connects the city’s shifting regions, tracing a passage through personal, familial and mythic worlds.
At once an intimate dream portrait and an exploration of new creative techniques, The City Remains asks how emerging filmmaking tools can bring an intensely personal inner world to the screen, while keeping human imagination at its heart.”
