STILL OUT ambient road trip – Film Screening, Saturday 12 April, 7.30pm

Recently premiered at the Stroud Film Festival, Still Out is an audio-visual collaboration between music producers Will Cookson and Tom Haverly and filmmaker Rufus Exton. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers and by DJ sets inspired by the film.

Non-narrative in form yet resonant with embedded meanings, Still Out evokes a road trip from North Yorkshire to North Devon which Will and Tom took together in the summer of 2024. It features luminous footage of the natural world and a soundtrack inspired by their long-standing interest in ambient and electronic music.

The film is also an oblique homage to The KLF’s iconic 1990 album Chill Out, which the pair revisited after it turned up unexpectedly a few years back in Tom’s dad’s record collection. To create their own version, Will and Tom relocated to the Devon coast in late summer 2023, splicing together an audio collage from a mix of original and found recordings in a remote cabin with no electricity or mobile reception.

Only after Will met friend and filmmaker Rufus Exton later that year to discuss visiting various landscapes referenced in the music did the idea of creating a visual counterpart take shape. The resulting work is a 40-minute reflection on the mental and emotional shift that occurs when we step away from the routine of daily life. An adventure in feeling and form, it celebrates our ever-changing relationship to the world around us and the mystery of what it means to pass through time and space.