Pro Grip (How to be Humans)

Jordan Baseman's new film, Pro Grip (How to be Humans), is showing at The Box in Plymouth, and it's on for a good while — it opened on 23 June and runs until 21 October. It's a multi-channel piece, so you're not just watching a single screen; the film plays across several, and it's about seven minutes long, which makes it an easy one to fit into a day out in the city.

The whole thing is built around arm wrestling. Baseman has taken archival footage from the TSW collection — specifically the 1990 UK Arm Wrestling Championships — and cut it together with an original interview with Dr Gray Atherton, a psychologist from the University of Plymouth. The arm wrestling matches are the visual anchor: you see competitors locked in, their faces going through a whole range of emotion, from total calm to absolute distress. Between those clips, Dr Atherton talks about non-verbal emotion — how we use gestures, movement, and facial expressions to communicate and bond when we aren't using words. The film puts the two side by side, and it leaves you thinking about how we recognise authenticity, empathy, and connection without a single word being spoken.

Baseman is a US-born artist and filmmaker based in London, and he teaches at the Royal College of Art. Pro Grip is the final commission from the British Film Institute's Reimagining the Film Archive programme (2023–2026), so it's the culmination of a few years of work. The project was supported by Plymouth City Council, the BFI, and Arts Council England, and Baseman worked closely with psychologists from the University of Plymouth — Dr Gray Atherton, Dr Liam Cross, and Dr Jackie Andrade — to get the psychological side right.

Entry is free and you don't need to book, so you can just turn up. The Box is on Tavistock Place, PL4 8AX, and it's open Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00 to 17:00, and Sunday 10:00 to 17:00 — closed Mondays. The film runs for 7 minutes and 9 seconds, so it's a short, sharp watch that stays with you long after you've left.