In Bingo, slot machines and overscans meet and meld, creating a space for our forgotten images. Archival imagery becomes a celluloid sculpture of fragments, accidents and half-remembered moments. These discarded images are set into motion: a game of chance where celluloid, memory and digital manipulation collide. Ka-ching! But who really wins?
Country
FranceYear
2025Length
5'
Category
ExperimentalPremiere
Italian
Cinematography
Filmati d'archivio, Cinémathèque de Nouvelle-Aquitaine (CDNA)Editing
Sarah FordSound
Sarah FordProduction
Sarah FordDistribution
Self-distributionAcademic and educational context in which the short film was developed
École Nationale Supérieure d’Art et de Design de Limoges (ENSAD Limoges)Synopsis
Biography
Sarah Ford is a Franco-British artist based in France, working across film, painting, photography and installation. Her work explores memory, transformation, disappearance and the unstable nature of images. Her films have been screened across Europe, including at Videoformes, the Cinecittà Festival and the Filmoteca de Andalucía. Bingo was developed in collaboration with the Cinémathèque de Nouvelle-Aquitaine.
Statement
Bingo has been in the making in my imagination since the first day I met the team at the Cinémathèque de Nouvelle-Aquitaine. We watched the digitisation of a village festival filmed in the Limousin in the 1960s. As the film was scanned, the image spread into the sprockets. The archival process produced a clean digital square, so everything beyond that was effectively cut away.
But there it was: faces, people, small accidents, things happening at the edges of the frame. Images that had never really been intended to be seen.
I became fascinated by the question of who decides what stays. What gives the digital square the right to record one image and discard another?
— Sarah Ford
Archival materials
Found footage supplied courtesy of Cinémathèque de Nouvelle-Aquitaine (CDNA)
University / Academy / residency / school / lab where the short film was developed
École Nationale Supérieure d’Art et de Design de Limoges (ENSAD Limoges).
