Pip: Raindance turns Soho into a temporary nervous system for independent film every June — and this year, the films showing up to that nervous system are doing some serious rewiring.

Mara: This episode covers work from DOWNTOWN 500 MAGAZINE — films that test how far form can stretch, interrogate the myths we build around place and identity, and ask what it actually costs to be misread by the world. Let’s start with the films and the cultural myths they’re pulling apart.

Raindance: Form, Myth, and the Editable Past

Pip: The question both films in this segment are circling is whether cinema can do something more than interpret history — whether it can actually expose the machinery that builds it in the first place.

Mara: The review of WHITENESS frames the film’s ambition precisely: “WHITENESS pushes further into instability: a work that does not reinterpret history so much as expose its editability. History here is not preserved. It is constructed through an image.”

Pip: So the upshot is that form itself becomes the argument. The film’s four colliding segments — satire, restored propaganda, a banned 1940s cartoon, Southern Gothic horror — aren’t blended. They’re left to crash into each other and generate meaning through friction.

Mara: Laundreams works a quieter version of the same idea. Set in a Sheffield laundrette, it dismantles the assumption that meaning begins elsewhere — that leaving is progress and staying is stagnation. The film treats that assumption as a social script, not a fact.

Pip: Both films are essentially asking: who assembled this story, and why does it feel inevitable?

Mara: Identity carries that same question — which is exactly where LET US BE begins.

Identity, Ambiguity, and the Cost of Being Categorised

Pip: The territory here is what happens when institutions, families, and public discourse demand a clean answer from a life that doesn’t have one — and what it costs the person being asked.

Mara: Lyss Ball, speaking in Viviane D’Avilla’s documentary LET US BE, puts it this way: “We often feel like both and neither. We can see ourselves in everyone we’ve ever met while simultaneously feeling like no one truly sees us.”

Pip: What that means in practice is that the film’s subject — intersex lives across Brazil, India, and the United States — becomes a lens on something much wider: the violence of being interpreted before you’re understood.

Mara: D’Avilla’s directorial approach matches that argument. The review notes she favors patient observation over polemic, letting participants speak in their own unhurried voices. She’s not building a case file — she’s making space.

Pip: And Ball’s arc in the film moves somewhere unexpected.

Mara: It does. She describes learning to be a chameleon, adapting constantly, still feeling like she removes a mask at the end of the day. Then: “Now, I just feel like I have a superpower.” That shift — from shame to something closer to authority — is one of the film’s quietest achievements.

Pip: The companion piece, Can We Live With Ambiguity, pushes the political dimension further — asking specifically why Britain struggles with this, in a public climate that rewards certainty over complexity.

Mara: D’Avilla draws a distinction there that gives the whole project its moral spine: “Acceptance can sometimes still feel distant. It can mean: I allow you to exist, but I may not really want to know you. Understanding is deeper. It requires listening, humility, and the willingness to change the way we see someone.”

Pip: Visibility without understanding — that’s a gap the film refuses to paper over.

Mara: And it’s the same gap WHITENESS refuses to close. Both films end in productive discomfort rather than resolution.

---

Pip: What connects all of this is a refusal to let form — cinematic, social, political — do the work of obscuring how it was built.

Mara: That’s the thread. Next time, we’ll see where it leads.