An excerpt from the booklet essay by So Mayer

If cinema is a mode defined by moving images, Zimmerman’s films say, then the ontology of cinema is not celebrity and spectacle, but the poor wayfaring stranger. Cinema, reconceived as a mode of travelling through this world, roots itself back into the motley, rackety world of vaudeville and rep theatre and commedia dell’arte and the Mystery Plays. Travelling troupes are a motif that appear in Estate, Wayfaring Stranger and centrally in Here for Life (2019), an Artangel-supported project made in collaboration with Cardboard Citizens, a theatre company of unhoused and precariously housed people informed by the political practice of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. Shaggy dog stories, capers and shifted realities spill outwards from the production being staged into the performers’ movements around and against gentrified London – or spill inwards from their experiences and interpretations thereof into the shaping of the play.

Making a formal connection between theatre and cinematic neo-realism through a central story that draws on The Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, Vittorio De Sica, 1948), Here for Life offers an anti-realist ontology, a critique of Eurowestern empiricism that insists against the dream, the (self re-invention, the performance, the tale as part of documentary. As Hettie Judah notes in her article on the film for Art Monthly, ‘In Theatre of the Oppressed, imagination is a tool for democracy: a little fiction helps communities reach a deeper truth… Who owns the story? In this piece of fiction as truth, no single individual.’ As a spectator of the Cardboard Citizens’ performance asks, brilliantly crystallising how the myth of ownership undergirds narrative and/under capitalism, ‘Who can define that this is yours not mine?’ If cinema is a mode of moving images, it is definitionally, in Zimmerman’s work, about how images and words are mobile, how meaning shifts as we become aware of the frame through shifting perspectives, how allowing for a more open and flexible definition of truth – one that encompasses multiple modes of relation – enables us to see more clearly what is there. It is only by moving constantly on a vector that we can know our position.

This is expressed on a formal level: Zimmerman’s films are films that you move through as they move through you, at human pace: walking, talking, cycling, wheeling, smoking, chilling, dancing, riding on a donkey cart. There are no standard establishing shots, no standard location shots from car or train windows. There’s a lot of slow, held but not fixed apprehensions that encourage us to take our time with a face or a place – perhaps earning a surprise that enters the frame from an unexpected angle or disrupts the composition, a bag of rubbish splitting or an eager dog charging in. Close kin to Agnès Varda’s documentaries, they are fascinated by the depth of surfaces: by graffiti and peeling posters, by signage formal and informal, by listening to the resonances in the words that people say of themselves, rather than antagonising or probing, by offering portraits that are also landscapes and landscapes that are also portraits. They are still, moving. No hectic camera tricks or CGI or narrative twists: all the aspects that commercial cinema means by the word ‘film’, and which are, exactly, a film or screen over our apprehension of the world as an immanently interconnected and interconnectedly immanent place.

So Mayer's complete essay, from which this excerpt is taken, and others appear in the booklet which accompanies the release.