Omer Fast

'Let's go back in time,' suggests Omer Fast lightly in voiceover. In the first segment of his three-part film installation, tellingly titled 'Nostalgia', you have to pay attention to catch the wretched admission, muttered low by a Nigerian asylum-seeker: 'All my thoughts about me are locked inside.' There they must stay, forever inaccessible. Instead, through an increasingly manipulative filmic hall of mirrors, Fast gives us all any storyteller can: his own interpretations of this man's history.

How you make a trap to catch a partridge is the innocuous detail from the real refugee's memories that the artist closes in on, strategically wringing out every useful drop of its dramatic, metaphoric potential in the scenes that unfold. Next, on a split screen two actors ham up the power-play between a cynical filmmaker interviewing a refugee so eager to give the right impression that he occasionally muddles the details. Adding to the self-reflexive chicanery, we learn this is all research for a retro sci fi film - the big-screen movie shown in the final section.

Animated by action sequences, heavy symbolism and emotionally intense storylines about loss, grief and redemption, the final instalment is as epic as anything you might see in a multiplex. Set in a future dystopia, a neat, Hollywood kind of switcheroo turns the asylum-seeker into a white Brit in Africa. Snaring very different audience responses, the tale of the trap passes from teller to teller, ranging from the immigrant keen to please his interrogator to a bourgeois writer reinventing the story for his dead child. Whatever individual reality we started off with has been fragmented and distorted almost beyond recognition in the service of an audience, both on screen and off. Indeed, the really special effect here is Fast's dazzling play with the politics of storytelling.