EVENT PREVIEW
Jeanie Finlay & Nicholas Barker

To coincide with Nottingham based artist Jeanie Finlay’s Home-Maker installation at Lakeside’s Djanogly Theatre, she and self-styled “bad boy of British documentary” Nicholas Barker will be meeting to talk about their differences and common ground.

Finlay’s Home-Maker takes the domestic space as a way of uncovering intimate truths about private and social identity, while Barker’s hugely influential Signs Of The Times series used the apparently whimsical device of ordinary people talking about their interior décor to expose all the class and gender prejudices of the British.

In another film, Unmade Beds, Barker turned four New York singles into quasi-fictional characters, and the audience into voyeurs, in a work that straddled fiction and documentary, asking real people to perform versions of their own lives for the camera. Unashamedly manipulative, Barker, like Nick Broomfield, has decisively changed the way that documentaries are made.

Jeanie Finlay’s approach is gentler, and more traditional in intention, listening closely to her subjects and showing them as they might wish to be seen. In Home-Maker, seven very different elderly people from South Derbyshire and Tokyo sit in their living rooms, and use their possessions to tell their own stories.

Both film makers use digital video and draw on factual subject matter, but their very different approaches and results should make for a fascinating session. Chaired by writer and director Chris Cooke, the event will also mark the official launch of Finlay’s Home-Maker website and book.

Wayne Burrows Metro Nottingham