01 MAY — 11 MAY 2025

01 MAY — 11 MAY 2025

Charlie Shackleton is a British multimedia artist, filmmaker and essayist who uses film to explore and challenge the conventions and evolution of cinema itself. His work, such as “Beyond Clueless” and “Fear Itself”, examines genres such as teen comedy and horror, always with an investigative and critical approach.

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Charlie Shackleton is a British multimedia artist, filmmaker and essayist who uses film to explore and challenge the conventions and evolution of cinema itself. His work, such as “Beyond Clueless” and “Fear Itself”, examines genres such as teen comedy and horror, always with an investigative and critical approach.

Charlie revisits cinema’s past in order to deconstruct it, question it and project it into another time and with another contemporary and poetic gaze.

Beyond Clueless

A film with DIY origins that premiered at the SXSW festival in 2014, featuring a collection of scenes from teen movies, particularly from 1995 and 2004 — the title is a reference to Clueless, the successful 1990s teen movie with Alicia Silverstone that adapts Jane Austen to the American high school. The narration is by Fairuza Balk, the protagonist of The Craft, and includes an original soundtrack by the British duo Summer Camp.
Charlie Shackleton
United Kingdom

2014, 89'

Camera Test (King Cadbury)

The director just wanted to test a new camera and use an expired 16mm film stock. Seeing his crew out of ideas, Charlie Shackleton tells an amusing family story involving a 1963 Cadbury ad. 
Charlie Shackleton
United Kingdom

2024, 7'

Copycat

Charlie Shackleton explores a possible vein of inspiration for one of the most successful horror films in American cinema, Wes Craven’s iconic Scream (1996): an obscure film by Rolfe Kanefsky, There’s Nothing Out There, which works in the same metatextual universe that winks at the horror genre.
Charlie Shackleton
United Kingdom / United States

2015, 8'

Fear Itself

Signing briefly as Charlie Lyne, Shackleton travels through a plethora of horror films (apart from the opening and closing sequences). It comprises material from other films (classic, cult, etc.) to explore the viewer’s relationship with fear and cinema. 
Charlie Shackleton
United Kingdom

2015, 88'

Fish Story

A film that threads the blurred line between documentary and fiction to explore a story that seems to be more myth than reality: Caspar Salmon tells us how, in 1980, he attended a meeting on an island in Wales where only people with surnames related to fish were present.
Charlie Shackleton
United Kingdom

2017, 14'

Lasting Marks

A look at Operation Scanner, during Margaret Thatcher’s final days in power, a case where the police arrested 16 men convicted of the crime of filming consensual behavior linked to sadomasochism. Their story has been told by everyone but themselves. 
Charlie Shackleton
United Kingdom

2018, 14'

Missing Episode

Poet and artist Ross Sutherland and his parents were watching an episode of the British soap opera EastEnders when they were interrupted, and they never finished it. This film revisits that episode twenty years later. 
Charlie Shackleton
United Kingdom

2017, 30'

Paint Drying

Paint Drying (an expression that refers to the most boring activity imaginable) is a cheeky protest against the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), a board that assigns a compulsory classification to all films that want to be exhibited in the UK, charging an excessive fee that weighs mainly heavily on independent filmmakers. Shackleton made the film (with the help of a crowdfunding campaign) specifically to force the BBFC to sit for 607 minutes, without audio, looking at a static shot of paint drying on a brick wall.
Charlie Shackleton
United Kingdom

2016, 607'

Personal Truth

A film that was inspired by Pizzagate, one of the most absurd conspiracy theories that came out of the 2016 US elections between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and which leads Charlie Shackleton to take a theory from his youth in order to explore notions of scepticism. 
Charlie Shackleton
United Kingdom

2017, 18'

The Afterlight

In Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, someone tells an actor that 100 years from now he will come back to life whenever a reel of his work is projected. In this film, countless actors from all over the world come back to life, creating a cast of angels and ghosts. The film has a single 35mm print, incorporating natural wear and tear in each viewing, until it erodes definitively.
Charlie Shackleton
United Kingdom

2021, 82'

Zodiac Killer Project

Just as it was never proven who the Zodiac Killer was, so was Charlie Shackleton unable to move forward with the big screen adaptation of the book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge by Lyndon E. Lafferty, who believed he knew the identity of the elusive criminal. But that didn’t stop Shackleton from making a movie-about-the-movie-he-would’ve-made, in a cinematic evocation of the true crime genre. Zodiac Killer Project is imaginative, intriguing and a masterful deconstruction that includes the most beautiful sunset.
Charlie Shackleton
United Kingdom

2025, 89'

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