Lonesome Ghosts

Lonesome Ghosts explores the ramifications of undercover policing in the UK. Organised into four chapters, the film focuses on the history and role of undercover policing in British life. Moving between filmed and found footage, evidence and personal testimony, the work offers an examination of the complex affinities between personal commitment, state violence and visual culture. Each chapter centres a different voice or material: a meeting with an exhausted and lonely political organiser; silent footage of a funeral filmed by an undercover policing unit in 1979; an interview with a photographer who discovered he was the target of police surveillance; and a filmmaker grappling with the dreams and failures of collective filmmaking. Commissioned by Peer, London.