Bridget Smith: We Must Live!

'Individually we have our troubles, but when we get together it feels different,' says one of the subjects of Bridget Smith's film. It's the kind of philosophy you'll hear in any pub in the country. This being Spain, the drinkers are enjoying themselves in a square while around them preparations for a fiesta take place. 'We Must Live!' is a local amateur dramatics club - bit players in Smith's 30-minute video who nonetheless embody themes of mortality, faith and superstition that waft through this sun-filled saunter.

The setting is the feast day of Santa Martha - giver of hope and curer of ills - in a Galician village. Believers enact a symbolic death by climbing into a coffin, which is paraded through the streets. Participants are interviewed, but this bizarre spectacle isn't the film's sole focus. As fans of Smith will expect, her lens is trained not only on the structures - religious, secular, actual or imagined - that formalise faith and facilitate its expression but also on the peripheral, sometimes deviating details that tell us just as much about human behaviour. A grumpy padre ends up stealing the film with lines like 'It's not even a good statue.'

This is a cleverly nuanced account of how, in the face of life's mysteries, we search for meaning and find comfort in fabrications of various kinds, art included. Separating the film from photographs of interiors, such as rooms in the shrine complex at Lourdes, is a heavy, powder-blue curtain that adds considerable drama to the installation while bringing to the fore the idea of art as a conduit to the unknown. Whether or not you're a believer, Smith proves herself to be an insightful guide to this complicated business of being alive.