Still

Graham Short is a British micro-artist who works at a scale most people can barely comprehend. His engravings — some with letters just 6 microns tall — are made in the tiny windows of stillness between heartbeats, the only moments when the human body is still enough not to introduce error into work this precise. He has spent decades perfecting this discipline, and the results have to be viewed under magnification to be seen at all.

The Khanda symbol he engraved on the point of a needle was inspired by visits to the Sikh temple in Handsworth, Birmingham, a community he encountered and came to admire. Still is a film that connects two very different kinds of devotion: the meditative precision of an artist who has trained himself to act in the spaces between heartbeats, and the faith practice of a community that values stillness and presence as acts of worship. It's an unexpected pairing that turns out to make complete sense.