Projects in categories: Fiction

Synopsis

Shane Meadows' second feature film, A Room for Romeo Brass, is a funny, frightening and ultimately tender story of two twelve-year-old boys who each undergo an extraordinary test of character and friendship when an eccentric and dangerous stranger comes between them. Meadows, winner of the Best First Feature Award at the 1997 Venice International Film Festival for his directorial debut TwentyFourSeven, and co-screenwriter Paul Fraser drew upon their own childhood experiences to forge this high-spirited and contemporary coming-of-age story.

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Set in the heart of a shoppers' paradise, a world of consumerism. In this bizarre 21st century mayhem are three talented shoplifters who tell of their loves, fears and desires.

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Ethel really loves cats. Giving a home to strays takes her mind off her lonely days. However, this black comedy has a sinister twist in its tail.

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Only after a 10-year period can a mother bring a father and son to an understanding of each other - love can conquer all, even in the bleakest situations.

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An exploration of the treasure of Russia's National Library, where Vassily Stepanovich Zvarychuk, curator of the recorded music collection and conductor of the Library's orchestra, is the living embodiment of Nietzsche's claim that 'music is the means by which the passions enjoy themselves'.

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The true story of Sandra who at 21 discovers she has an inoperable brain tumour. The film moves from the comic to the tragic and the realistic to the surreal.

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Giacomo Campiotti's A Time To Love is a romantic drama spanning 100 years and three different couples. Ciaran Hinds and Juliet Aubrey star in the first episode as two lovers in colonial Africa during the Boer War, whose passionate love affair is frustrated by the conventions of the time. The film then skips to Nazi-occupied Paris, where the relationship between a young French woman and her Russian lover unravels because of her jealousy. Finally, in contemporary Italy, a young girl nurses a teenage boy back to health through her devotion.

Campiotti, whose debut Like Two Crocodiles won a Golden Globe nomination for best foreign film in 1995, employed unorthodox means to research his film. Keen to write about love, he asked first friends, then strangers - through a small ad in a newspaper - for stories about love. His only stipulation was that they be real. Sifting through the mountains of letters and notes he was sent, he realised that there were key moments that all the stories shared, which mirrored the seasons of the year. He then teamed up with Alexander Adabachian, with whom he co-wrote Like Two Crocodiles.

With financing in place from Italian, French and British sources and a European cast including Ciaran Hinds, Juliet Aubrey and Natacha Regnier, the film cranked up its staggered shoot in late 1998. It premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 1999.

Synopsis

Peter and Martha, Claire and Gabriel, and Naty and Guiseppe have discovered the magical moments that belong to all love stories. A Time to Love is a captivating and romantic tale of love's evolution traced through three different couples in three different eras, each couple taking over where the last one left off. The first romance is set in South Africa during the Boer War, the second in Paris during the German occupation in World War II and the third takes place in present day Italy. Each story is unique, but all are entwined with that invisible thread which bind humanity in a much more profound manner than one made up of tradition and history.

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After closing time at the Gwyn Arms, Tom pours himself a pint, lights his pipe, selects his favourite Gladys Knight single on the juke box, and remembers the good old days...

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A day in the life story of three young people who meet through a chance encounter and decide to become criminals together for one brief moment.

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A rare UK-Norwegian collaboration, Aberdeen reunites actor Stellan Skarsgard with Hans Petter Moland, the acclaimed writer-director of their much admired 1996 feature Zero Kelvin. An emotional road movie, it co-stars Lena Headey as a young lawyer reluctantly fulfilling her ailing mother's request that she bring her alcoholic father back from Oslo to the Scottish oil industry capital of Aberdeen. Her intention is to enrol him in a rehab programme, but en route they are both forced to re-examine their relationship and the reasons for their trip.

'It's a very tough and exceptionally unsentimental account of the bond that develops between the daughter and the father during their journey,' explains co-producer John McGrath. 'When I read it I loved the characters, the quality of the writing and the fact it was set in Scotland. It felt a very natural co-production project rather than some Euro-pudding and it actually reactivates a long dormant UK-Norway co-production treaty.'

Synopsis

At the centre of About Adam, is a Dublin family consisting of a mother Peggy, three daughters Lucy, Laura and Alice and son David. Into their lives comes Adam - an enigmatic young man.

At first he meets Lucy who finds him shy and gentle. As she herself is a singer/waitress in a restaurant and is extrovert and fun-loving, she surprises herself by this attachment. The relationship grows until she is head-over-heals in love with Adam. Indeed she is the one who proposes marriage to him - which he accepts. The date is set.

What Lucy doesn't know is that her older and more serious sister Laura has been bumping into Adam, in all sorts of places. She has a different view of him, finding him intellectual and passionate. Conversation and literature draw them together until, despite her guilt, the inevitable happens and they begin an affair. But then, Adam's acceptance of Lucy's proposal leaves Laura in a quandary, not knowing where all this leading to, but reluctant to give him up.

Meanwhile little brother David is having a classic problem - how to get his girlfriend to sleep with him for the first time. He sees in Adam a fellow lad, a football fan, an experienced man of the world who might help. Which Adam happily does. They conceive an elaborate plan to create the right circumstances for David and Karen to get it together, but somehow it all goes wrong. David's anger abates later however when he finds Karen more than willing. Adam is his hero.

Finally the eldest sister Alice, who is both perceptive and unhappily married, realises that there is more to Adam than meets the eye.