The Great Bear (2019)
22’29

Filmed in and around Thrapston, Northamptonshire over the spring and summer of 2019,  The Great Bear explores narratives of labour and landscape in the arable English Midlands. An area with a strong farming identity, Thrapston is also home to a more recent logistics economy dependent on an international workforce.  Intensified by its focus on the young,  the film intertwines human activities and subjectivities of work with patterns of seasonal change, the landscape both source and product of working life.  The film’s score is composed and performed by improvisational jazz musician Felix Weldon.

The Great Bear is an artists’ film commission for WORK, devised by Animate Projects. Four films exploring contemporary working lives in the middle of England, made in Derby, Thrapston, Birmingham and Bolsover, by artists Dryden Goodwin, Jenny Holt, Esther Johnson, and Adam Lewis Jacob. To see all four films including The Great Bear please visit the WORK website

An Animate Projects commission in partnership with Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, supported by Jerwood Arts and Arts Council England.