Projects in categories: Documentary

Synopsis

Inside a Tanzanian hospital, serving 20 million people, UK surgeons and nurses work tirelessly to teach modern medical procedures to their African counterparts. Operating on those in need, they change the landscape of medicine in Africa forever.

A film documenting a week spent in one of Tanzania's busiest hospitals, accompanying a group of 10 volunteers representing the Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.

The film highlights the importance of the 17 year relationship between Northumbria and Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre, and concentrates on a project to introduce Laparoscopic surgery now in its 11th year and a more recent burns project. We follow Irish Surgeon Dr Liam Horgan , who now in his 11th year working with KCMC, manages to make medical history in Africa during the week.

Uk born but now practicing in Australia, plastic surgeon Dr Jeremy Rawlins is introducing modern burns procedures to a country where burns cases are prolific in number but largely untreated. The film explores the dire need for improved conditions, equipment and knowledge of burns treatment as we concentrate on five patients. Not all outcomes are of a positive nature.

Synopsis

Ex-miner Les Moore can't let go of the past. Thirty years since the end of the miners’ strike the last UK coal mines face closure. As Les fights to preserve the mine’s legacy his family must find a way to survive in a fragmented and forgotten community.

Synopsis

A single, steady shot records the rising tide in the evening. Using sound and text, the film invites you to think and experience beyond the boundaries of the frame.

Synopsis

A poetic portrait of an Iranian watchmaker, whose philosophical musings on craft invite us to reflect on how we engage with time in a fast-paced world. Moving between his colourful pared-down home and the streets and windswept marshes of East London, we discover the horologist's ascetic and beautiful private world.

Synopsis

A grim display of misguided patriotism and tribal thuggery during the England-Germany 2010 World Cup football match.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Debate Strand

Synopsis

In 2012, the Ivy House pub in Peckham was sold to property developers as part of the ongoing gentrification of south London. The locals opposed it. Unfolding from this scenario, the film weaves verbatim testament into folk operatic form with the Ivy House itself, embodied and imagined as a central character and inhabited by the memories of the generations who have passed through its doors. Sarah Turner films the community’s creative reanimation of the mourned pub through dance, poetry and song... which both records and creates a vision of social possibility... The activism that saved the pub is a metaphor for social and creative agency. This is not just a film about resistance; it is a film that itself refuses categorisation... a triumphant genre-blending documentary which turns community action into an exhilarating participatory opera. (London Film Festival)
Public House premiered in the documentary competition at the 2015 BFI London Film Festival and was nominated for the Grierson Award. The film has since been re-edited and remastered in a new version for wider audiences.

Synopsis

Cairo cardiologist Bassem Youssef ('the Egyptian Jon Stewart') quit surgery to front the hugely popular TV satire Al Bernameg (The Show) amid the country’s turbulent Arab Spring-led political upheavals. Youssef ultimately fell foul of government crackdowns. His programme was cancelled and he was forced to flee the country with his family.
This fascinating, fearless and often very funny documentary charts Youssef’s incredible late-career shift, detailing his and his team's determination and courage in standing up to successive totalitarian regimes, reminding us just how potent and dangerous comedy really can be.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Laugh Strand

Synopsis

In the late '80s and early '90s, daredevil entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson made an audacious attempt to cross the Atlantic and Pacific in the world's largest hot air balloon. This film is a personal revelation; a dramatic tale of survival and drive. Branson recounts his experience with uncanny vividity, and reveals how baiting death forever changed him.
Tribeca Film Festival 2016 - World premiere

Synopsis

Passionate in his anti-Semitic beliefs, Csanád Szegedi was the rising star of Hungary's far-right party until he discovered his family's secret - his maternal grandparents were Jewish. The revelation prompts an improbable but seemingly heartfelt conversion from anti-Semite to Orthodox Jew.
This confrontational film explores the complex and contradictory character of Szegedi, prompting deep questions about Szegedi's supposed epiphany.
Tribeca Film Festival 2016 - World premiere

Synopsis

March 2004. The artist known as Banksy illegally erects a ten-foot statue in a small square off Shaftsbury Avenue in central London. Titled 'The Drinker', this sculpture is a replica of Rodin's 'The Thinker' - with a traffic cone placed on its head. The only clue as to who put it there is a stencil on the plinth that merely says 'Banksy'. Then, one day, in broad daylight, masked thieves pull up with a flatbed truck and cart 'The Drinker' away - a reporter from a national newspaper receives a ransom note from a man calling himself AK47, claiming to represent a group of 'art terrorists' calling themselves 'ART KEIDA'.
After several years back and forth between the media, Banksy and Art Keida, it is alleged that the artist called Banksy 'arranged' for the statue to be destroyed by any means necessary... Now, after all this time, it seems that AK47 is about to breathe new life into the saga.
Tribeca Film Festival 2016 - World premiere

Synopsis

A biographical documentary about the remarkable and turbulent career of British film and TV director Antonia Bird - the first British woman to direct a Hollywood movie, who died in 2013.
The film explores her battles to break down the barriers against her gender and her politics, to get her voice heard, and to bring a radical edge to popular drama.
It reveals the secrets of her greatest work - Safe, Priest, Face, Ravenous, Care, The Hamburg Cell - through the testimony of her closest friends and collaborators, including Robert Carlyle, Mark Cousins, Kate Hardie, Irvine Welsh and Steven Mackintosh.

Synopsis

An original and compelling documentary depicting one father’s long-term struggle with heroin addiction, told through the uniquely intimate perspective of his own son.
After years of acrimony and estrangement, young film-maker Phillip Wood seeks out his father to try and understand what’s happened to him. But his father is now seriously ill and over the next few months Phillip’s visits force both to confront some uncomfortable truths about their past.
This documentary offers a strikingly stark exploration into a subject that significantly affected the film-maker's childhood. An intimate, revealing documentary which shows addiction from a different side and challenges assumptions about how families can rebuild their broken relationships.