The Sea is History, made in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, is a free adaptation of the poem by Derek Walcott. The film is a materialist and animist critique of the monumentalisation of European colonial history, reading the past instead as something intimately entangled within the present - as a living and mutational thing made up of the living and the dead. It is in this sense that the film suggests a way beyond the boundary évent that could be called the Plantationocene (brought on with the onset of modernity and the system of globalised capitalism that started with the colonisation of the Americas in 1492, with Columbus arriving in Ayiti; latter day Dominican Republic) - and towards a possible "Chthulucenic" future of créolised assemblages as a politics of re-narrativising death within life.
Made in Santo Domingo - the first capital of the New World, and on Lago Enriquillo - a hyper-salinated lake, once part of the Caribbean sea, that is flooding the border with Haiti due to the drastic rise in sea temperatures that are currently deeply affecting the global ocean.
Palmarès
Festivals
06/2017 - Hamburg International Short Film Festival, Germany
06/2017 - Edinburg International Film Festival, Schotland (in competition)
02/2017 - Sonic Acts Festival, Amsterdam, Netherlands
02/2017 - Transmediale, Berlin, Germany
01/2017 - International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands
10/2016 - Doclisboa, Lisbonne, Portugal
10/2016 - Matatu Film Festival, Oakland, CA, USA
09/2016 - BFI London, UK (work in progress version)
Screenings
09/2017 - Pera Museum, program "On Memory or How Can I Doublethink?", Istanbul, Turquie
01/2017 - Colloque EHESS / Caméras Politiques, Paris, France
06/2016 - Espace Khiasma / Kinesis (solo show)
Born in Norwich, 1983 and currently living in Paris. In 2007 Henderson received a First Class BA Honours in Film and Video from London College of Communication, and in 2013 graduated with ‘felicitations du jury’ from Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains. He has shown his work nationally and internationally, including Rotterdam International Film Festival, CPH:DOX, Le Printemps de Septembre, Belo Horizonte Film Festival, Jihlava Documentary Festival, EMAF Osnabrueck, British Film Institute, Centre Pompidou, Museo Reina Sofia, Tate Modern and Whitechapel Gallery.
Henderson’s films can be categorised as documentary-fictions that engage with subjects such as post-colonialism, history, politics and anthropology. His cinema reflects on society’s cultural and material remains and as such his films are essentially archaeological; focusing on the signatures of the archaic in the contemporary.
In 2015, he received the Barbara Aronofsky Price for emerging visual artists in the 53rd edition of the Ann Arbor Festival USA and the Best European Short Film at the International Film Festival T-Mobile New Horizons in Wroclaw, Poland.
His latest films are produced by Spectre and distributed by Phantom (FR) and LUX (UK).
He lives and works in Paris.
Filmography
Overtures, work in progress
Sunstone (2018) Super 16mm and HD, 16:9, Stereo Sound, 34 minutes
The Sea is History(2016) HD 16:9, Dolby 5.1, 21 minutes, 27 minutes
Black Code/Code Noir (2015) HD 16:9, Dolby 5.1, 21 minutes
All That is Solid (2014) HD 16:9, stereo, 15 minutes
Lettres du Voyant (2013) HD 16:9, Dolby 5.1, 40 minutes
Logical Revolts (2012) HD 16:9, Dolby 5.1, 44 minutes
A Walk With Nigel (2010) HD, 16:9, Stereo sound, 22 minutes