This Human Form (2026)

This Human Form traces how desire takes shape across a life, moving from the unstable image world of childhood through inherited systems that seek to define the body, and into the charged collective space where those structures begin to fracture. Drawing on family archive, medieval iconography and contemporary queer experience, the film explores the shifting boundary between the human and the monstrous. The film unfolds in three movements. It begins with degraded VHS footage directed by Hough as a child, in which he appears on camera as vampire, monster and wandering creature. Filmed by his brother, these fragments of home movies, staged horror scenes and accidental tape overwrites collapse memory, performance and play, turning childhood image-making into an early rehearsal of otherness. It then turns to the present day, where Hough’s mother, Sheila, makes intimate rubbings of medieval carvings. Mermaids, chained animals and grotesque heads emerge through touch, reactivating inherited moral codes once inscribed onto stone and body alike. These figures echo forward and backward in time, linking the imaginative space of childhood to older symbolic systems of control, excess and desire. The film finally enters the nightclub, a queer space in London that Hough regularly inhabits and that forms part of his community. Here bodies gather, collide and transform. Desire becomes collective and unstable as animal and human forms begin to blur. Across these shifting states, from containment to pressure to release, This Human Form resists resolution, holding identity as something embodied, volatile and in continual transformation.

This Human Form (2026)
VHS-C and 16mm film, transferred to 4K digital, colour, sound.
Running time: 21 min 48 sec

Funded by the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

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