Tension Structures – a new film by Feargal Ward and Adrian Duncan will have its world premiere at the upcoming IDFA documentary film festival in Amsterdam. The film was created through the Arts Council’s Reel Art arts documentary scheme and was co-produced by the Pompidou Centre, Paris.
The film follows an unnamed engineer as he undertakes a rail trip from the site of a long-demolished bridge in a quiet Bavarian town to a giant cloud made of fabric in Paris. As the journey unfolds a series of ambitious tensile structures from the recent and distant past are revealed, all holding different promises of utopian futures. The film explores the structural and social forces affecting a continent on the brink of fracture, forging unexpected connections between some of these structures and the tensions surrounding the Gilets Jaunes protests.
This film is actually a sister work to our Reel Art funded feature that screened at the Dublin film festival earlier this year (Floating Structures, 2019, 65 mins). Adrian and I felt there was another film in the material we had already gathered so we spent the summer editing away. It’s a great validation for the work we undertook to premiere at such a prestigious festival and we’re really thankful to the Arts Council for affording us the freedom to attempt this.
Feargal Ward
Tension Structures presented Feargal and I with an opportunity to re-examine a series of buildings in Bavaria and Paris to see what analogies were available in these structures for framing questions about contemporary societal forces of control and rupture. We are very pleased to be showing this essay-work as part of the Paradocs strand of IDFA this year. We’d also like to thank Centre Pompidou for their creative support.
Adrian Duncan
Tension Structures was written and directed by Feargal Ward (The Lonely Battle of Thomas Reid, Yximalloo) and Adrian Duncan (Bungaló Bliss, Memory Room)). It was filmed by Feargal Ward with additional photography by Jonathan Sammon. Script was by Adrian Duncan and was narrated by Ian Maleney. Musical score was provided by Karl Burke.