Second Home and Jeremy Hicks, chair of Russian culture and film at Queen Mary University, will present a double bill of documentary films Lord of the Flies and About Love, from acclaimed documentary filmmaker Vladimir Tyulkin (Kazakhstan).

Lord of the Flies is character study, a dialogue with a pensioner and self-declared visionary, a man who has discovered and implemented in his own smallholding a gruesome solution to humanity’s and nature’s problems through an ingenious use of cats, dogs, flies and chickens. Tyulkin’s film permits his subject to expound his views on the world, reflecting on his experience of his country’s traumas, and extrapolating on the political analogies of his home as a system. The film comments on its subject sardonically through editing, animal sounds and music.

About Love documents a woman caring for dozens of unwanted dogs in her tiny apartment and presents an intimate portrait of an unusual character. Despite focusing on individuals, Tyulkin’s films are pictures of post-Soviet life from a perspective rarely addressed in mainstream documentary. Compassionate and horrifying, sympathetic and frantic, excremental and otherworldly, About Love is dominated by the bodies and sounds (and even smells) of the dog pack. But, as its title suggests, divine love is at the centre of this film, making almost literal the God-dog anagram.