About

Filmmaking, live film-mixing projects, film events and workshops

Dear Future is an artist led organisation who make films and curate film and moving image events. Our annual Dear Future Festival ignites conversation and explores new ways of thinking into the future. We collaborate with musicians, artists, thinkers, scientists, writers and poets. Filmmaker Rebecca E Marshall leads our filmmaking projects, workshops and live film-mixing events.

Live film-mixing

Rebecca's live mixing technique uses V-J software to gather and layer film material of people, light, colours, atmospheres and landscapes as a live show. It is a radically different process of filmmaking and sharing with an audience; testing, playing and re-seeing footage as a one-off event.

The technique enables poetic and collaborative experiments with uncertainty, humour, wonder, coincidence and accidents. It enables explorations into non-linear ideas and stories, and challenges the myth of carving singular routes into the past or the future.

Her performances create vibrant, intimate and unexpected spaces. Audiences are part of an event that is unique, with the excitement that comes with witnessing a live art form.

The Team

Rachel Pearson and Rebecca E Marshall together have run film events and projects for over twenty years; commissioning, collaborating and curating community projects, film programmes and festivals. Dear Future is inspired from their mutual passion project - The Electric Palace Cinema, Hastings, East Sussex. This bijou community cinema has been thriving independently since 2002, supporting a huge community of film lovers and film makers.

Rebecca E Marshall

Rebecca is a filmmaker and Doctor of Philosophy through the practice of film. Her daily exercise includes filming moments of everyday life to plunge into a space of deep looking. These clips form an expanding sketch book of moving images for use in her projects. As a filmmaker she embraces uncertainty and ongoing change to explore wider human experiences of time. She is drawn to offbeat stories with a seam of dark humour. She also enjoys trying to understand anything about quantum physics.

She co-founded The Electric Palace Cinema in Hastings, where she curated a year-round programme for over twenty years. She is now a visiting lecturer for the MA documentary department at The London Film School. Her workshops facilitate creative thinking through the practice of film.

Rachel Pearson

Rachel is a creative person captivated by thoughts on how to connect people and ideas in exciting and unusual ways. She has a notebook by her bed so she can write down strange thoughts that strike at night.

She co-founded The Electric Palace Cinema, where her notes inspired innovative film events and her dedication brought them to life year-round for over sixteen years. She is skilled at grass-roots project management and forging large scale community development projects.

She works as a practising jewellery maker using extraordinary found objects such as bones, metal and stones from both river and sea shorelines. She is a registered Mudlarker with a fascination for all things lost and found and their peculiar stories.

Our Commitments

Responding to the needs of a diverse society
Ensuring equality of access and opportunity
Maintaining financial transparency and ethics
Reducing our impact on the planet and its climate
Creating the conditions where imagination, experimentation and risk can thrive

Dear Future is a legacy community interest project that brings creativity to work with film and moving image, with a core aim of making filmmaking and film events exciting, accessible and inclusive to a wide range of people.