2025 ROUND-UP

Hi and happy hols! The year has flown, thanks in large to some fab projects, and during that time Soup has quietly turned 25! (We will do something next year for sure to celebrate 🙂

Our work with Suzanne Lacy has been front and centre this year, with Uncertain Futures opening in Berlin at the start of the year and then going headlong into a new major commission for Manchester International Festival, ‘What do Women Footballers Want?’, looking at transatlantic perspectives on the past, present and future of women’s football and how women footballers impact society’s attitudes toward women – and how cultural perceptions and practices shape the way we see players and the sport itself. The project saw us shooting in Los Angeles and Manchester with an incredible cast of characters, and shaping these dialogues into a 5 channel design installed at Aviva studios.

On an anniversary tip, our film/s for Elbow’s Leaders of the Free World turned 20, a project that saw us spend the best part of a year filming, animating, drawing, eating and drinking with Elbow at Salford’s finest Blueprint Studios. Definitely due an upscale, but here’s a link to a little medley from many moons ago.

Autumn into Winter saw us working with Imperial War Museum North and the incredible Young Identity to forge a response to the Pan African Congress that took place in Manchester 80 years ago. Using the museum’s Big Picture Show canvas (20 odd screens, 40 channels of sound), we created a performance-led response soundtracked by longtime friend and collaborator, Afrodeutsche. You can catch ‘The Roads We Walked’ everyday at either 1pm (termtime) or 12pm (hols).

We’ve spent the last few years looking at ways to bridge the gap between the work we’re doing at Soup and our links at SODA (School of Digital Arts), bringing in projects from Factory International and Imperial War Museum into the curriculum and creating opportunities for students to work with us on set and in the studio. IWM North have been a key collaborator, and this last few months, all of the SODA MA students have been responding to the poems Young Identity created for the Pan African Congress to create their own Big Picture Show, using the same infrastructure, built knowledge and post-tools we have developed in the studio through our 15 or so years experience of making films in the space.

Next year is looking fun with Uncertain Futures carrying on it’s adventures and heading to London’s Wellcome Collection as part of their spring launch ‘The Coming of Age’. This is the second time we’ve had our work shown at Wellcome, with Permissible Beauty screening there as part of the incredible ‘Cult of Beauty’ exhibition, and can’t wait to see it realised in context to the wider show.

More projects are on the horizon with the mighty RCMG and picking up on an exciting project with Neville Gabie (Factory Works) following on from some shooting earlier this year.

Wishing everyone a fab break and see you next year! Xx