Projects in categories: Fiction

Synopsis

A victim of bullying, Joe takes revenge on his tormentors by choosing violence as the way forward through the aid of 'magical specs'.

Synopsis

A waitress is distracted from reading a letter by the customer opposite. Eventually she cannot help but hear his story.

Synopsis

Oliver Knott was fairly confident of raising the £4m budget for his feature debut - the gangster/boxing project Bare Knuckle. After all, he had a number of short films under his belt, including The Wednesday Club, which toured several international festivals. However, one year later, when his production pot was still empty, he opted to scale down his ambitions and wrote a new script which could be shot on a shoestring. Free Spirits is set in a bar in south London and follows four characters over the course of the hottest day of the summer: bar owner Bandanna Bob, fighting off a takeover bid; his friend Matty, who's having girlfriend trouble; Jimmy, a boxer trying to make a comeback; and aspiring actress Kelly, who likes Bob but is too shy to tell him. The single location and one-day timespan of the story helped keep costs to the minimum. Principal photography was scheduled for a mere eight days, including interiors in the main location, a Clapham pub. The deal struck with the pub's owners that the crew would arrive at 8am and wrap by 5.30pm each day meant that cast and crew worked at a heroically frenzied pace. Free Spirits was the lowest-budget feature ever to be completely post-produced at Twickenham Film Studios. In fact, Sir Richard Attenborough was cutting his latest film, Grey Owl, in the room opposite at the time, and his editing staff donated 30,000ft of mag stock to Free Spirits. Knott's next project is a screenplay for Swedish production company Channel 1; he is also working on a spec feature script called The Googly.

Synopsis

Set in a bar in South London, Free Spirits is an hilarious, sexy, feel-good and deliciously foul-mouthed comedy following the fortunes of four individuals throughout the course of the hottest day of the summer. Bandana Bob, the Bar owner, is fighting off a takeover bid from a particularly ruthless developer. Matty, Bob's trusty sidekick is having trouble with his furiously maternal girlfriend. Jimmy, a boxer on the comeback trail, is having a hard time supporting his family, not to mention his double crossing manager. Kelly, an aspiring actress, really likes Bob, but being shy, is unsure how to proceed with her amorous desires. And then there's the customers - office girls, clergymen, drug dealers, bald men, salesmen. You won't believe their antics, or reasons for being in the bar. Never will you see a British comedy in quite the same way after seeing Free Spirits. A comedy about being who you want to be, and doing what you want to do . . .

Synopsis

A visually stunning film, both beautiful and bizarre, Frog enters a dark fairytale world where mysterious frog creatures enter a house over successive nights and steal the eyes of the three strange residents only to replace them with surreal clockwork eyes that need to be wound by a special key.

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'What prevents me from supposing that this table either vanishes or alters its shape when no one is observing it and then when someone looks at it again changes back? But one feels like saying - who is going to suppose such a thing?' (Ludwig Wittgenstein On Certainty 1949-51) The film-maker accepts the challenge of the philosopher and changes not only a table but also chairs, shoes, jugs, teapots and almost everything else lying around his house.

Synopsis

Gangster No 1 tells the story of the emblematically named Gangster, who rises through the London underworld to usurp his mentor Freddie Mays (David Thewlis). But director Paul McGuigan sees it as much more than a genre crime film. "It's like a Greek tragedy, about a man who is propelled not so much by hatred but by obsession," he says. "Because it's a simple, character-driven story we could put a lot of thought into the whole style of the film," explains McGuigan. The stylish surface is appropriate for the story of a man obsessed by the glamour of gangland life. Production designer Richard Bridgland, who had the task of recreating 1960s London for the substantial portion of the film that takes place in flashback, says he responded to what he describes as the "mythic quality" of the script. "The gold, mirrors and glitter play a part because it's all empty, like the hollow victory Gangster scores," Bridgland explains. He and McGuigan searched for "1960s modern" locations in hotels, clubs and flats around London, while costume designer Jany Temime dressed the men in sharp suits from tailors such as Mark Powell and Ozwald Boateng. Paul Bettany, who plays young Gangster in the flashback scenes (Malcolm McDowell is the older, present-day Gangster) saw the image as essential to his character: "When you're standing there in a pure silk suit by Mark Powell... well, half your job's done for you." McGuigan was drawn to the "powerful and unusual" script with its "poetic" voice-over, as were the actors; Thewlis describes the language as "stylised and eloquent, straight out of left field". McGuigan's first full-length feature after his award-winning trilogy of shorts The Acid House, Gangster No 1 was released in the UK in June, to critical acclaim.

Synopsis

Set in 1960's Soho, a blood-chilling battle of wills is played out between London's leading gangster and the young apprentice who wants to usurp him. A study of cunning, deceit, violence, betrayal and obsession.

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An unemployed 20-year-old loser ends up at the local shop wearing a balaclava and with a suspicious bulge in his coat pocket. But the shop keeper recognises him

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About size. It reminds adults and informs children of the way which the world appears to change simply because one gets physically bigger.

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Based on the lives of three actual London girls this is the real teenage take on life, shopping, boys, music and . . .everything. Built around a series of improvised conversations, vividly brought to life by strikingly colourful animation.

Synopsis

A young mum of three dumps her kids at her lesbian sister's house on the day of her pagan wedding, to go on a small crime spree with her boyfriend Dennis.