“…Rooney empathises and charms us into feeling the subjectivity of his protagonists. Who else but him could achieve such deep pathos with such down-to-earth subjects, methods and materials?” The Guardian.
“…sound art at its least routine, imagination performing a ventriloquist’s act, speaking out of the haunted past in a borrowed voice.” The Wire magazine.
NEWS
21st February 2026 – Broken Token shown as an Official Selection for New Jersey Film Festival and United States Super 8 and Digital Video Festival, New Brunswick Centre, New Jersey.
2025 – Broken Token shown as an Official Selection for these Film Festivals: International Film Festival The Hague, Netherlands; Living With Buildings IX Film Festival, Coventry; and Aegean Film Festival, Patmos. Also shown at Popup Shorts from the Aegean Film Festival, Andreas Kalatzis Gallery, Patmos.
18th October 2025 – a selection of Paul Rooney video works shown at GIFT001 event, Plymouth, with Mitch/U.F.O (DJ), Miles J Paralysis (DJ), Bodmin Momentum Centre (DJ), Andy Smith (live), Bulletinthevalley (DJ).
2024-2025 – Broken Token sound work and film, an Imperial War Museums 14-18 NOW Legacy Fund commission in partnership with The Box, Plymouth.
A single female voice sings of waiting in her garden for her ‘dark-eyed sailor’ to return from war, bearing the other half of their token, a gimmel ring. Three veterans pass on the road as she waits, and she asks them: “When you were fighting in distant lands, did you think of the home you left?” In reply the veterans relate their recollections. The garden images in the accompanying film represent ‘home’, but also stand for a more general possibility of redemption, of the potential of the past to return at any time, disguised and changed, to renew the present: “Each moment of time is a garden gate,” the song goes, “Through it my love may walk.”