Projects in categories: Fiction

Synopsis

A Yorkshire milltown in 1957. Ellen Hardy is unhappily married but is close to her ten year old son, Victor. The family has recently moved house and Victor has started at a new school where Ellen has become friendly with his teacher, Kathy Thompson, who is keen to encourage him at art.
 
As the friendship between the two women grows, Ellen's millworker husband, Hardy, feels increasingly alienated at home. Meanwhile, Ellen's sister Alice emigrates to Australia to start a new life and soon the Hardys go on a disastrous seaside holiday.
 
Will Ellen - torn between her duties as a wife and mother and a fear of admitting her feelings for Kathy - also have the courage to break free emotionally and follow her destiny when she returns home?
 
A homage to classic British films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and This Sporting Life, Between Two Women is the first feature from North Country Pictures - committed to bringing to an international audience top quality stories that reflect the history, culture, and literature of the Pennine region past, present, and even future.
 
"A poignant, refreshingly contemporary tale of love across the class barrier" - Radio Times.
 
"The script, acting, and directing are top notch. If this film had been produced in Hollywood,  it would be synonymous with the word Oscar" - Toronto Free Press.
 
"The bleak industrial cities in the north of England have been the settings of many a gritty drama. With Between Two Women writer-director Steven Woodcock has made a notably lyrical film amid a grim setting" - Los Angeles Times.

Synopsis

Beyond Recognition is the story of an affluent cosmetic surgeon, Jeffery Mills, and his dangerous encounters with an underworld organisation who want him to change the face of their leader Matzo.
 
With a maze of increasingly sinister tactics of persuasion, Matzo and his gang thrust Mills into an evil world, far removed from his own. Mills soon finds himself lost in a remote town in Italy, hunted by the FBI for murder - his life and career in ruins. Police conspiracies, poison, abduction, corruption and extreme confusion reign, with Mills desperately searching for answers and some way to claw his life back.
 
Will he succumb to the pressure? Should he trust the FBI agents who say they're there to help? Whose body is found in his car? And who's really pulling the strings. Mills is manipulated by powers beyond his control, beyond reason and beyond the law, culminating in a fast and frenetic conclusion, with an unexpected twist at the end.
 
An explosive psychological thriller set in upstate New York and the Italian Alps.

Synopsis

Molly wakes dazed on the floor. Joe has a gun. Not all is going to plan.

Synopsis

When Hassan an asylum seeker gets stopped for speeding, his is wrongly suspected of being a terrorist by an over enthusuastuc 'bobby' on the beat. Hassan knows that any black mark against him and he and his family will be deported, so he has to come up with a plan - fast!

Synopsis

A thief breaks into a house and finds himself trapped in the dark with a somnambulist, a drunk and an insomniac houseguest. Told almost entirely with stereo sound, this simple comedy seeks delight in showing us what is going on only when it matters.

Synopsis

Blind Flight is the true account of the kidnapping of Brian Keenan and his subsequent captivity with John McCarthy in the Lebanon in 1986.
 
Brian Keenan and John McCarthy spent four and a half years together, confined underground and chained to the wall of their cell. The two men, pawns in a game of international politics, were utterly different in personality, physical appearance and background.
 
The bullish working-class Irish Republican Keenan, who went to the Lebanon as a teacher to escape the horrors of Belfast, and his youthful English cellmate, the handsome, charming, upper-class McCarthy, a journalist ironically reporting on Keenan's own captivity, could easily have found each other at opposite ends of a gun barrel in the streets of Keenan's Belfast. Instead, in the face of the most acute deprivation and under the constant threat of death at the hands of their captors, they forged a relationship that transcended all that appeared to divide them.
 
Blind Flight tells the compelling story of this extraordinary relationship as both men resurrect their deepest memories, feelings, fears and loves which makes the film a 'love story' in the fullest and most humanistic sense.

Synopsis

Running from a dark secret, Danish backpacker Mike Hammershoi (Anders W. Berthelsen) arrives at Black's estate in the Scottish Borders, looking for work. Cut off from the outside world, Francis Black) Peter Mullan, the blind owner, lives there in a shuttered-up, decaying mansion, with his elderly mother Bella (Phyllida Law).
 
Francis reluctantly offers the traveller a low-paid job in the yard. Put off by the unsettling atmosphere, Mike declines the offer. But as he turns to go, he sets eyes on Rachel (Jodhi May), Francis' enigmatic young wife, and changes his mind. Mike starts work on the farm, dumping the debris of the Blacks' once-successful business into the mud pit - a bottomless vortex of quicksand at the end of the land.
 
Mike soon realises that Francis, increasingly embittered by his blindness, exerts a domineering power over Rachel. Rachel, emotionally suffocated by her husband, is increasingly attracted to Mike, whose presence awakens her pent-up sexual desire. Unable to resist each other, they become lovers. As the sexual tension increases, so too does Francis' jealousy rage. In a fit of anger, Francis sacks the traveller. The threat of Mike's departure forces Rachel to choose between her husband and her lover. Unaware of his dark past, Rachel decides to run away with Mike. Seething with fury, Francis stands, knife in hand, by the edge of the mud-pit waiting for the unsuspecting lovers as they prepare to make their escape.

Synopsis

Blue Gene Baby portrays visions of Genetic Identity and the scanning of the individual. The complexities of the individual can be reduced to numbers, codes and patterns through science. Genetic profiling and engineering hold a potential for human transformation both good and bad. But who will be checking the morality of these scientific advances?

Synopsis

The basic plot  tells the story of a twenty one-year-old university student, Manisha, and her English boyfriend, Paul. What follows is a typical and very moving story of the clash between her modern way of life and her parents preconceptions of how she must live.

Synopsis

Bonny plants a sunflower. With the help of her dog 'Banana' and 'Mo' the bird, she learns that what goes up must come down and sometimes vice versa.

Synopsis

A rodent arrives in a box - a battle of wits between an old man and a mouse begins.

Synopsis

It's the late 60s. The English invasion has conquered the world! The Liverpool Sound tops the charts in every country - except Ireland! There, so called Ceili music - a form of traditional music - still reigns supreme. And they're about to hold the annual Ceili competition to determine who's the best band in the land.
 
But could the unthinkable happen? Could an upstart English band from Liverpool win the All Irish Championship for the first time in history? Transplanted Irishman Jimmy MacMahon (Colm Meaney) and his motley English crew have their hearts set on it.
 
Meanwhile, back in County Clare, Ireland, Jimmy's stalwart older brother, John Joe (Bernard Hill) and his fiesty local band are determined to win the trophy for the third year in a row.
 
The long-standing feud between the MacMahon brothers finally boils over as each tries to sabotage the other and win the first prize, by hook or by crook.
 
Wnen Liverpudlian Teddy (Shaun Evans), Jimmy's best flute player, falls head-over-heels in love with Anne (Andrea Corr), the beautiful young fiddle player in John Joe's band, her overly protective mother, Maisie (Charlotte Bradley), fears her daughter will end up heartbroken.
 
In an attempt to stop Anne from seeing Teddy, Maisie tells her daughter her own deepest, darkest secret - the true identity of Anne's father. He is none other than John Joe's rotten but charming younger brother Jimmy, who promised Maisie the world and then abandoned her once she was pregnant.
 
Now, 20 years later, a boldfaced Jimmy shows up - with no apparent regrets - throwing Maisie into a tizzy and infuriating John Joe who was in love with Maisie himself before John Joe stole her heart.
 
When all the blarney's said and done, blood is still thicker than water, but - when the time comes to play - who' s going home with the trophy?  Who's going home with Anne?