Projects in categories: Documentary

Synopsis

Ever since Venus and Serena Williams started playing in tennis tournaments, they've provoked strong reactions - from awe and admiration to suspicion and resentment. They've been winning championships for over a decade, pushing the limits of longevity in such a demanding sport. How long can they last? In Venus & Serena, we gain unprecedented access into their lives during the most intimidating year of their career. Over the course of 2011, Venus grappled with an energy-sapping autoimmune disease while Serena battled back from a life-threatening pulmonary embolism. Neither Venus nor Serena let their adversities hold them back. They drew their greatest strength from each other.

Synopsis

A Tale Of Two Syrias is a snapshot of life before Syria’s uprising began, seen through the eyes of two people: Salem, an Iraqi refugee and fashion designer in Damascus and Botrus, a monk in the remote hillside monastery of Mar Musa. This film is about their dreams, discussions, and questions around freedom and choice in the year before Syria descended into serious conflict.

Synopsis

Feature documentary. A detailed, true to life, extraction, filmed over four months, of the day to day events... ups, downs and tribulations of a young reggae singer striving to break into the music industry in the U.K. Filmmaker Mark Brown wraps the audience up into the artists emotions revealing the excitement and disappointment that unfold through different stages of Bayo's attempts to make his music heard in the right circles.

Synopsis

In the heart of Sicily, where the Mafia still rules, one man and his family-run TV station, has become a relentless voice against corruption and organized crime. “The Valley of the Jato” portrays the daily life of self-made journalist Pino Maniaci on his personal crusade to free Sicily from corruption with his family run TV Station, Telejato. In a land fighting with itself to purge old traditions, energetic, chain-smoking Pino Maniaci appears as a controversial maverick struggling to stay on-air in shifting times.

Synopsis

An observation, investigation and social record of the lives and thoughts of ten residents of the Golden Lane Estate, London. Built in the late 1950s by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, the Golden Lane estate exemplifies an utopian ideal of social housing. This film documents the life of the complex over half a century since its construction and asks questions about domestic and private space and of making a home in such an iconic and distinctive architectural environment.

Synopsis

A powerful and inspirational film about the loss of childhood, the stripping away of identity and, ultimately, the hope of reconciliation, all set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. Through innovative animation, the film tells the story of the 4000 Basque children evacuated to the United Kingdom in 1937. Forced to bid a hurried farewell to their parents, these children were told they would only be in the UK for three months. 75 years later, some are still there, forever separated from their parents and their homeland, their families torn apart and their childhood destroyed by a brutal and bloody conflict. Through the voices of 14 of these children, now in their 80s & 90s, we reveal this tragic episode in history in a stunning animated documentary that is profound, unexpected and uplifting.

Synopsis

Daniel Gordon’s 9.79* looks at the legacy of the 100-metre men’s final at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, when gold medalist Ben Johnson tested positive for anabolic steroids and scandal reigned. For the first time ever, the eight athletes who ran that infamous race tell their story.

Synopsis

Imbued with nostalgia and striking a wide range of emotional notes, filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel travels to the Lebanese refugee camp of Ain El Helweh to explore how the camp's displaced people use the World Cup series to articulate their own ideas of home, community, victory and hope (TIFF 2012).

Synopsis

The Kogi civilization still survives hidden on Colombia's highest mountain. They believe they are guardians of the world. Their leaders are trained from infancy in darkness to connect with 'aluna', cosmic consciousness. They perceive 'black lines' that connect special sites essential to life. In 1990, convinced that we were destroying the earth, they sent a warning through a British film-maker and then withdrew. They have realised that we have ignored the warning and the world is in danger. So they recalled the film-maker and instructed him to film their demonstration of these connections, using 400km of gold thread. People who have no wheel or writing travel to England for the thread, and discuss dark energy with a leading astronomer. But as their journey goes on they realize that the film-maker has no idea what they are trying to demonstrate and their own arguments are treated as fantasy. So they change tack, taking us up into their mountain to show exactly what they mean, and then coming down to join forces with leading scientists who recognize that they are communicating important cutting-edge knowledge.

Synopsis

Lifelong drifter Christopher Ellis has made his home on a small island off the west coast of Scotland. For six years he has lived in virtual isolation, being the only inhabitant of the island and rarely returning to the mainland. Every winter Christopher journeys on foot to his home town of Leeds to earn a month’s wage as a pot washer in an Italian restaurant - enough for him to live off for the next year. My Island is a portrait of one man’s lifelong pursuit of independence. A proud, self-defined tramp, Christopher Ellis challenges modern expectations about settling down, instead finding a simple pleasure in living hand-to-mouth in reflective seclusion.

Synopsis

Mystic Fighters will take your breath away with a strong cinematography based on a character driven narrative and you will discover the deadly art of stick fighting in Trinidad & Tobago like no one has approached it before. It takes you into a world beyond preconceptions where the poorest becomes the man of knowledge and the guardian to one of the eldest traditions based on the interaction between man and nature.

Synopsis

3 Continents, 4 barbers, 1 story... The Fade is an intimate portrait of four barbers across the world over a week in their lives. The observational documentary reveals a portrait of their lives and shines a light on the profession barbering. Set in Ghana,Jamaica, USA and the UK the film interweaves their stories and examines the polarized opposites of the locations. Creating an international dialog of the colorful lives of four men who do they same thing in different time zones, with very different realities.