b/w16mm,Super8+Col Digital,(DCP) sound.41min, September 2026, AHRC Funding

In This Room returns to conversations and images Sarah Pucill made with her mother in Taking My Skin (35 min, 2006), revisiting them in the light of a family secret told years later. What was seen, heard and understood at the time is altered by this later knowledge, as past and present are brought into an apparent simultaneity.

The bounded space of the family living room holds together different moments: her mother’s death, the film they made together fifteen years earlier, difficult childhood memories and the subsequent revelation of a parental secret. Red roses that had lain on her mother’s coffin slowly wither and dry. This colour footage is interwoven with outtakes and a sequence from the black-and-white celluloid Taking My Skin, in which mother and daughter film one another in the room and beside the river. Their earlier conversation acquires a different resonance retrospectively, revealing the spaces between what could be spoken, what remained hidden and what could not yet be understood.

Returning to earlier images has a lineage across Pucill’s filmmaking, from her encounters with Claude Cahun’s photographs and writing in Magic Mirror (2013) and Confessions to the Mirror (2016), to the restaging of her own work in Double Exposure (2023). Here, that revisiting becomes acutely personal: the image becomes a witness, carrying meanings not fully recognised when it was made.

Marking a new turn in her filmmaking, a rhythmic voice-over and piano composition, both by Pucill, interlace camera and voice.  At the film’s centre is the mother–daughter relationship, and the possibility that images can hold what could not be spoken, becoming acts of recognition and witness.