Projects in categories: Fiction

Synopsis

Richard, a struggling artist in the midst of a breakdown that has left his career and his love life in tatters, attempts an ill-conceived insurance fraud and gets caught. He is sentenced to 120 hours of community service in lieu of jail. His assignment: to act as a 'caregiver' for Jane, a young woman confined to a wheelchair due to a rare degener-ative neurological disorder. Jane turns out to be anything but a timid and helpless paraplegic. Sheepish Richard finds his charge sarcastic, profane and mischievous, and as uninhibited as he is repressed. At first, Richard is convinced that he's the wrong man for the job, but he and Jane soon settle into a truce that blossoms into a deep and mutually supportive friendship. Then Jane shocks Richard by announcing that it is his responsibility to help her achieve her fondest, most impossible wish: to experience, along with the rest of humanity, the joy of sexual intimacy ... a request that forces Richard into a tailspin of conflicting feelings and wild adventures.

Synopsis

A young woman treks around a London park on a Summers day. Hit and miss meetings ensue while her ruminations on life and dreams may not stand up in the pedestrian chaos. Can she figure fantasy from reality? Is the journey better than arrival?

Synopsis

Set in the same south-east London streets where he himself had grown up, and drawing on his own experience of a violent family home, Oldman’s debut as a writer-director captures a particular corner of London life – one marked by petty crime, drug-taking, domestic abuse and hair-trigger violence – with an unflinching authenticity rarely seen in British cinema. Oldman draws stunning performances from his cast, in particular from Ray Winstone as the rage-filled patriarch Ray, and Kathy Burke as his wife Val, who yearns for more from life than the cycle of abuse and low expectations. Shot with a visceral, up-close intimacy, the film has been remastered to 4K from the original camera negative, and its impact remains every bit as searing today. (London Film Festival)

Synopsis

A dance drama on the situation of Winston Silcott and three young men wrongly convicted of killing a policeman during riots in October 1985 during the Broadwater Farm riot in Tottenham, North London.

Synopsis

1936. David, an unemployed young man, leaves Liverpool to join the fight against Fascism in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. He joins an international section of the Republican Militia on the Aragon front where he experiences the trials and anguish of the war. Wounded, he convalesces in Barcelona and is caught in the conflict on the Republican side between the Communist Party and his revolutionary comrades in the militia. The resolution of this conflict and David's return to the front may seem tragic but his belief in the possibility of revolutionary change is unshaken. His story is revealed only after his death, sixty years later, in letters discovered by his granddaughter.

Synopsis

Inspired by real events, Ladybird, Ladybird is a love story; the story of Maggie and Jorge and their struggle to have a family. Maggie has had four children, by four different fathers, removed by Social Services because of a previous violent relationship. When she meets Jorge, a gentle Latin American refugee, she gradually sees her chance for happiness, but her history still haunts her and she finds it difficult to escape the image that is described in her official records. Ladybird, Ladybird is an emotional and harrowing story of a woman's fight to keep her children and her relationship intact.

Synopsis

Bob Williams is a survivor. He supplements his dole by becoming embroiled in whatever scam is on offer, from rustling sheep to rodding drains. But now life has dealt him a bitter blow. His van has been stolen and his daughter, Coleen, is approaching her first communion. She needs the traditional white dress, shoes, veil and gloves. Bob's pride is at stake. Where on earth is the money going to come from?

Synopsis

Margaret Schlegel (Emma Thompson) and her sister Helen (Helena Bonham Carter) become involved with two couples: a wealthy, conservative industrialist Henry J. Wilcox (Anthony Hopkins) and his wife Ruth (Vanessa Redgrave), and a working-class couple Leonard Bast (Sam West) and Jacky (Niccola Duffet). The interwoven fates and misfortunes of these three families and the diverging trajectories of the two sisters’ lives are connected to the ownership of Howards End, a beloved country home. An adaptation of E.M. Forster’s 1910 compelling study of one woman’s struggle to maintain her ideals and integrity in the face of Edwardian society’s moribund conformist values. A classic novel of class relations and changing times in Edwardian England. Cannes 2016 - Cannes Classics

Synopsis

Based on the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Derek Jarman's nearly wordless visual narrative intercuts two main stories and a couple of minor ones. A woman, perhaps the Madonna, brings forth her baby to a crowd of intrusive paparazzi; she tries to flee them. Two men who are lovers marry and are arrested by the powers that be. The men are mocked and pilloried, tarred, feathered, and beaten. Loose in this contemporary world of electrical-power transmission lines is also Jesus. The elements, particularly fire and water, content with political power, which is intolerant and murderous. THE GARDEN was originally screened in the Forum programme of the Berlinale in 1991, garnering an OCIC Award - Honourable Mention. Official Selection Berlinale 2019 - Forum Archival Constellations

Synopsis

A mythic recreation of the private world of the black artists and writers such as Langston Hughes who formed the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The film switches from archive footage to a stylized version of the jazz and blues era of Harlem to explore white society’s barriers against black homosexuality and self-imposed ‘discretion’. Official Selection Berlinale 2016 - Panorama Teddy 30

Synopsis

In London, four very different people team up to commit armed robbery, then try to doublecross each other for the loot. Official Selection Berlin Film Festival 2020 - Berlinale Classics

Synopsis

An Asian family who become homeless are placed in a bed and breakfast hotel by the local authority. There they come into contact with other people from different backgrounds who are waiting to be housed. Their plight is depicted with sensitivity and humour. Jonathan Pryce plays a single Irishman who drifts around London sleeping rough. HOTEL LONDON was originally produced in 1987. The film was remastered in 4K in 2025 by the BFI National Archive. Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2025 - World premiere (Remastered version)