Nathan Hughes

An award winning writer/director selected for a showcase of filmmakers whose work ‘demonstrates a distinctive cinematic or artistic vision’. Nathan recently wrote a dark comedy screenplay set in West Wales about grief, and how we configure, and disfigure identity in relation to place. He works with Environmental Humanities and Human Computer Interaction academics, and PhD candidates as a media consultant and research collaborator. Nathan uses participatory ethnography and speculative narrative to investigate Eco-Psychoanalysis, Cosmic Pessimism and the Anthropocene Imaginary.

My project is envisaged as a hybrid of stand up and academic presentation, in which an earnest attempt to articulate a theory of the Erotic Sublime, is undercut by a ‘coming of rage’ memoir of my psychosexual development in 1980’s Wales. Divorce, puberty, discovering my Dad’s porn stash, and obsessive consumption of horror films and pulp novels, unleashed a febrile amalgam of seminal forces. Using archive, video, performance and lurid graphics, I will venture through personal time and cultural space to advance a robust theory of The Erotic Sublime. Key themes include Cinema, Dylan Thomas’s pantheism, ecological precarity, Hammer Horror, The Welsh Landscape, and Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology.