Back to All Events

RAFT: 'Here For Life'

Raft Festival presents a screening of Here For Life, a film by Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Adrian Jackson, followed by live conversation and readings

[ID: Film poster. Background is an image of two figures, one seated one standing in a boat stranded up on a shingle beach]

Doors: 7pm

Tickets: £7 - £15 

This event is part of the Raft Festival programme (see the main festival page on our website for full listings). 

One-off tickets are available for every Raft event on a sliding scale basis. We encourage you to consider purchasing a ‘festival pass’ bundle ticket which will allow you, at a reduced rate, to access a given number of events across the full programme (either 5 events, 10 events, or all 30 events). See the link below for more details about these options!


In a world and a city framed by finance and loss, ten Londoners make their wild and wayward way, arguing for their own terms of definition as they go: singular lives, nudging towards a co-existence stronger than 'community'. On reclaimed land they find themselves, between two train tracks, on the right side of history, making their own wagers with the present tense and future hopes: with who has stolen what from whom, and how things might be fixed. Hesitant, troubled, open to wonder, bearing their wounds, so they, unruly, stage their lives. It is a heightened, often contradictory rite of passage; finding solidarity in resistance, clear of demands except the right to go on.

 Sometimes we simply need to hear our stories told by someone else...

Here For Life is a 2019 film by Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Adrian Jackson. The cast dance together, steal together, eat together; agree and disagree, celebrate their differences and share their talents. They cycle, they play, they ride a horse. The lines between one person’s story and another’s performance are blurred and the borders between reality and fiction are porous.

The screening will be followed by live conversation and readings.

 Andrea Luka Zimmerman is an artist, filmmaker and cultural activist. Andrea’s work is concerned with marginalisation, social justice and structural violence. She has been nominated for The Grierson Award and The Film London Jarman Award. Her films include Erase and Forget (2017), which had its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival and was nominated for the The Glashütte Original Documentary Award and Estate, a Reverie (2015),which documents the last days of Hackney’s Haggerston Estate before its demolition, the artist’s home for 17 years.

 Adrian Jackson is a theatre maker, playwright, teacher, translator and one of the world’s leading experts on the Theatre of the Oppressed. In 1991, he founded Cardboard Citizens, a theatre project that aims to change the lives of homeless people through the performing arts. He has directed over 50 plays with Cardboard Citizens, including Pericles (2003) and Timon (2006) with the Royal Shakespeare Company, The Beggar’s Opera(1999)with the English National Opera, Mincemeat (2009), winner of an Evening Standard Theatre Award and A Few Man Fridays (2012). Jackson had a long association with Augusto Boal–the Brazilian theatre maker, theorist and founder of the Theatre of the Oppressed–and has translated a number of Boal’s books into English. More recently, he directed a production of Ali Taylor’s play Cathy (2016/17), and, with Caitlin Mcleod, Home Truths, an Incomplete History of Housing Told in Nine Plays (2017).


RELATED EVENTS