Sunday

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
2009

Sunday
Duane Hopkins
2009

Various lengths
Multiple channel audio/video installation, S16mm transferred to HD

UK director Duane Hopkins’s full-scale installation project Sunday is both an extension of his previous films and a haunting, elegiac projection-based work in its own right. Consisting of a series of subtly looped diptychs and triptychs, Sunday focuses on the West Midlands youth of his much-celebrated feature-film debut Better Things (2008) and his early shorts Field and Love Me or Leave Me Alone.

Hopkins captures the ennui, sadness and beauty of isolated adolescence in painterly tones and colours that recall the British Romantics, while twinning and reconceptualizing his landscapes to evoke the broody, twitchy surrealism of the ever-encroaching contemporary world. Sunday builds to a climax of poignant helplessness, a politics of alienation that presages the violence and turmoil that engulfed England this summer.
—Noah Cowan