MU/T/T/ER by Kondo Heller screens at all fruits ripe presents: Landing Strips, the third edition of Birmingham Critical Film Forum.

The screening also features work by Yasmyn Nettle and is curated by Candice Nembhard.

In MU/T/T/ER, over the course of an evocative sixteen-minute video and audio collage, compiled where Heller was living during lockdown, snatches of English and German share the space with remembered or re-discovered Swahili and, as a background murmur to all these, a subliminal but ubiquitous resident voice that surfaces in the spluttered mutterings and stuttered utterances that are the common parlance of someone living alone. These fragments of inner monologue, mumbled under one’s breath or spoken out loud, are matched to different rooms in the house, as if to echo different facets of the self. Little bubbles of speech that percolate through the larger bubble of the home, they coalesce with a hubbub of other sounds, from the chatter of television and radio to conversations over the internet or on the telephone. Heller’s video is a poetic reminder of the patterns and habits of introspection, and the quiet tumult of everyday personal thoughts that reverberates within.

MU/T/T/ER (2021) by Kondo Heller is commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella as part of BEYOND.