we are making a film about mark fisher - close & remote

What does it mean to make a film about Mark Fisher in 2025?

This question is the starting point, of We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher, a new feature-length documentary exploring the legacy, ideas, and spectral presence of the late cultural theorist.

More than a biopic, the film is a dérive through the rewired landscapes of 21st-century Britain. Shot across England’s edgelands, from Thamesmead to Felixstowe, Fisher’s thought becomes both a map and a haunting.

Featuring Justin Hopper as 'Professor Parkins', a ghost-story character who stumbles through time from 1909 to 2025, the film invokes hauntology, BBC ghost stories, 90s rave, and the golden age of the NME. Voices drift, stories overlap, and locations recur in a documentary that avoids easy nostalgia and refuses finality.

Rather than rehearse Fisher’s biography, the film offers a meta-fictional meditation on his impact across music, aesthetics, politics, and digital culture, engaging with K-Punk, Acid Communism, capitalist realism, and the collapse of futurity.

Directed by Close and Remote (Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter) in collaboration with Justin Hopper, the film includes contributions from: Andy Beckett (The Guardian) // Tim Burrows (author of Place: East Anglian Landscapes)// Michael Valentine West, Farmer Glitch, and Cutout Joconde (original score)// Judit Bodor // Natalie Hyacinth // and many more.

Graphic Design by Joe Magee

📍 The Auxiliary, Middlesbrough🗓 Friday 26th Sep | 5:30pm - 8pm

Free, donation

This year’s film’s programme unfolds across a series of intimate screenings in The Auxiliary’s new bar space, opening its doors for the first time during the festival. Our selection of artists’ films, documentaries, and expanded cinema reflects on the speculative, the situated, and the deeply personal, asking what kinds of worlds are made possible through moving image. Whether through collective memory, grassroots resistance, or imagined futures, each screening invites us to sit with complexity, and to consider the multiple realities unfolding around us. In keeping with the 2025 festival theme In All Possible Worlds these screenings propose cinema as a site of attention, exchange and transformation All screenings are free and open to all. Accessible venue. Capacity is limited, so booking is recommended. Get your free tickets to the performance and join us for the opening night!