Emily Wardill: Gamekeepers Without Game December 22, 2010

'Gamekeepers without Game' is Wardill's re-imagining of the 17th-century play Life Is a Dream (La Vida es Sueno) by Pedro Calderon de la Barca, set in contemporary London. Wardill's meticulously constructed film tells the story of a child who had been banished from the family home. When the girl becomes a teenager, her father's guilt leads him to devise a plan for her return. Yet by this time the divide between them is too great: the girl's destructive response to the objects and people around her leads to her being once again estranged. Set to a hypnotic drumming soundtrack, which highlights the spatial construction of the narrative, the film's story is told with a refractive, methodological precision, juxtaposing inanimate objects and the inter-subjective play of multiple narrators. This