(33 minutes, 2023, HD video)

This film is a ghost story that explores horror — both real and imagined.
While puzzling over aerial photographs from early 20th century Iraq and Egypt, a filmmaker finds herself increasingly unsettled by images that want to share their violent secrets. England has been colonised by a marauding spirit and the Empire’s undead start to speak back to the film’s troubled investigator. TROUBLE is the second part of a project that uses archive photographs to explore a history of bombing.

With support from the Artist in Residence programme at the Centre for Law and the Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London.

Winner of the FID Marseille ’23 Flash Competition Award for short & medium length film and video.

“[Trouble] carefully plaits a number of seemingly distinct cultural and historical strands, and in so doing, offers a counter-narrative of British colonialism in the Middle East…” “

Michael Ciminski, REVIEW: FID Marseille ’23 , In Review Online

“In these images of ruins illustrating the imperialist enterprise of knowledge and control, Pennell discovers the scars hidden by the archives; like so many unhealed wounds through which repressed History surges back to challenge the official narrative”

Margot Mecca, FID Marseille