Close-up of a figure looking upwards wearing cardboard glasses.
ProgramPhotofields

All Light, Everywhere

Screening
Ended 6 Dec 2024
$10—$15
Golden Age Cinema

Photofields presents Theo Anthony’s documentary All Light, Everywhere (2021) and Powerhouse short film production Human Computers (2024), both screening at Golden Age Cinema and Bar.

Anthony’s feature length documentary investigates the biases inherent in human perception. Focusing on astronomer Jules Janssen’s Passage de Vénus (1874) – considered one of the world’s first motion pictures and depicting the trajectory of Venus across the sun – the documentary explores understandings of the camera as a scientific device intended to capture absolute reality.

Directed by Liselle Mei, Human Computer is a short film exploring the work of female scientific assistants. From 1916–1968, women known as ‘human computers’ worked at Sydney Observatory on one of the most ambitious photographic endeavours in history: the ‘Carte du Ciel’ (Mapping the Stars) project. A collaboration between 18 observatories around the world, the project aimed to record all the stars in the night sky on photographic plates. During this time, female employees at Sydney Observatory classified almost 740,000 stars on 1400 photographic plates. This film focuses on Winsome Bellamy, who measured the stars at Sydney Observatory for 20 years.

Directors

Theo Anthony is a filmmaker based between Baltimore and New York. His first feature documentary, Rat Film, premiered to critical acclaim with a successful festival and theatrical run followed by a broadcast premiere on PBS Independent Lens in early 2018. Anthony was the recipient of the 2018 Sundance Art of Non-Fiction Fellowship and the 2019 Sundance and Simons Foundation Science Sandbox Fellowship.

Liselle Mei is a director, producer and writer. A graduate of New York University’s film school, her first film, Ana: Portrait in Days, screened at the Lincoln Centre. Her feature documentary, Love Opera, screened in Cannes Cinephiles to critical acclaim and was voted by audiences as best feature documentary at the Australian Screen Industry Awards in 2021. Her credits include Seeing Red (winner of a jury award at the Asian Pacific Film Festival) and Red Earth (finalist at the Asian American screenplay competition).

Program Partner