Golden Delicious, 2025, by Mairéad McClean screens at Swedenborg Film Festival, London, on Mon 8 December at 2pm
Swedenborg House
20-21 Bloomsbury Way
London WC1A 2TH
A new film by Mairéad McClean, commissioned by The Wapping Project in partnership with the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw will be screened at the Swedenborg Film Festival in London on Monday 8 December at 2pm.
Golden Delicious is part of a series of five films by Mairéad McClean titled Pamięć oddechu / Breath Memory, drawing on footage from the Polish Archive of Home Movies held within the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Pamięć oddechu / Breath Memory was commissioned for the Sonics & Scenics festival (26 June – 21 September 2025), supported by the British Council through UK/Poland Season 2025.
1 Golden Delicious by Mairéad McClean, from the series Pamięć oddechu / Breath Memory, 2025, film still
Golden Delicious, 2025, 3.15min, 16mm
Golden Delicious opens in a 1970s Polish orchard: archive footage from the Polish Archive of Home Movies shows a man in a suit moving between the trees, picking apples, tasting them, letting them fall. Quick flashes, like interference, cut to the filmmaker in a London park half a century later, re-performing his gestures. The present interrupts the past, folding into it in brief, flickering moments, until – in a quiet breach of the fourth wall – an apple leaves one era and appears in another.
By reversing the 8mm footage, the man seems to catch what she has thrown – a small act that unsettles the order of time. This is no neutral exchange: unlike a ball, the apple is held, bitten, chewed, its meaning taken in through the body. The film suggests the past can be entered, touched and returned, its meanings reformed with each encounter, echoing questions at the heart of quantum theory, where cause and effect need not move in a single direction.
A soundscape of echo, interference and crafted foley deepens the illusion, as if the filmmaker were in the orchard of the past, recording the sound.
The archival material for this film comes from the Janusz Dybkowski family.
Commissioned by The Wapping Project, co-commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, for the festival Sonics & Scenics, supported by the British Council through UK/Poland Season 2025.