I am Ricky Chambers, a self-shooting filmmaker and researcher based in London.
I studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, where I completed both a BA in Fine Art and an MA in Documentary, graduating with distinction. I hold a PhD from Newcastle University, supported by an AHRC award from the Northern Bridge Consortium.
As a filmmaker, my work is shaped by an interest in the socio-politics of place, personal and historical memory, and the experience of marginalised subjectivities. I have produced several short-form films that crisscross between documentary, ethnography, and experimental moving-image. These works are created in close dialogue with their subjects and guided by an ethos of co-creation—foregrounding active listening and a sense of play
Documentary is a relational and subversive medium; I create them because I believe they can disrupt status-quo thinking, and forge new solidarities and imaginaries along the way.
Forty-five Acres (In production)
Lyrical and humanistic, this chronicle of an East London housing estate and its many colourful residents was filmed across a seven-year duration. As the community experiences decline and social marginalization—and with a big-money development edging closer—they find solace, joy, and resilience in each other, despite an uncertain future.
When property developers come knocking, a community discovers home is never just home—and every place has its price
It’ll All Come Out in the Wash (2019/31mins)
It’ll All Come Out in the Wash is a short documentary film shot over a two week period and set entirely within the four walls of an East London Launderette. At once an existential drama and microcosm of the multicultural city, it delves into the personal thoughts, values, memories, and idiosyncrasies of several customers, as they wait for their laundry.
Chris #1 (2019/25mins)
Filmed periodically over three years, this intimate longitudinal documentary is the first in a proposed series exploring one individual’s encounter with mental illness. Combining an experimental slow-cinema approach with re-enactment and performance, Chris #1 offers a candid and poetic depiction of the psychotic experience, and its associated rhythms of self-care. Showing without sensationalism, a phenomenon simultaneously strange and quietly unspectacular.
And Then We Heard Shouts and Cries (2018/25mins)
And Then We Heard Shouts and Cries is an experimental documentary, made in response to the 1968 partial collapse of Ronan Point: a 22-storey East London tower block. Demolished in 1986, and replaced by rows of non-descript low-rise housing, the film uses archive material and audio interview to reconstruct it. Narrated with quintessential east-end humour and candour by past residents, witnesses and locals, their disembodied accounts construct a fragmentary, often unreliable, portrait of this forgotten post-war landmark.
