Being John Smith

About Being John Smith

Often rooted in everyday life and personal experience, John Smith’s films are full of surprises, transforming the mundane into the extraordinary. Renowned for their formal ingenuity, subversive humour and oblique storytelling, they blur the perceived boundaries between documentary and fiction, playfully exploring and exposing the language of cinema.

For this event, John Smith will present a varied selection of short films made over the past five decades, from the iconic The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) to the multi-award winning Being John Smith (2024), in which he addresses the trauma of possessing the most common name in the English-speaking world.

Since 1972 John Smith has made over 60 film, video and installation works that have been shown in cinemas, museums and art galleries around the world and awarded major prizes at many international film festivals. Retrospectives of his work have been presented at film festivals in 16 countries. He received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists in 2011, and in 2013 he was the winner of the Jarman Award, which celebrates the spirit of experimentation, imagination and innovation in the work of artist filmmakers. John Smith’s films are held in numerous public collections, including Tate Gallery, Arts Council England and MoMA New York.

“His genius is in taking found material, the most banal situation, the slightest little cue, and imbuing it with a fiction that makes it potent. It’s as if by choosing as his subject the ordinary everyday things that surround us all, and by scrutinising them closely, turning them over and inside out, he can find all the hidden complexity of the universe.” Cornelia Parker

“John Smith is my favourite British filmmaker” Jarvis Cocker