Film Premiere: The Miracle on George Green

High Line Channel artist Onyeka Igwe is joined in conversation by High Line Art associate curator Melanie Kress to discuss Igwe’s film The Miracle on George Green (2022).

The Miracle on George Green tells a collective social history of the UK tradition of the commons—land collectively owned and used to gather, play, and debate. The film centers around the George Green treehouse in East London. In the early 1990s, when the old sweet chestnut tree that housed the treehouse was threatened, a group of schoolchildren wrote letters to the treehouse as part of a campaign to save it. From this story, Igwe’s film expands outward through archival materials from other social collective sites. Igwe’s vision of the past and potential futures for the commons is particularly welcome on the High Line, a space built for connection and communality.

Working across cinema and installation, Onyeka Igwe creates non-fiction films that use text, images, and film from historical archives to shift the maps of how we understand the past and the present. Igwe’s films unfoldlike figure eights, led through music, performance, and mesmerizing voice-overs. Using a forensic lens, Igwe draws audiences into individual and shared stories that expand onto a multiplicity of narratives, rather than a singular, reductive history.

The Miracle on George Green is the second commission in High Line Art’s newest format: High Line Originals. Part of High Line Channels, High Line Originals marks the first time High Line Art commissions new video work and is intended to support emerging artists.

We encourage all persons with disabilities to attend. To request additional information regarding accessibility or accommodations at a program, please contact Constanza Valenzuela (constanza.valenzuela@thehighline.org) at least three days in advance of the event. Program venues are accessible via wheelchair, and ASL interpretation can be arranged two weeks in advance.