Projects in categories: Documentary

Synopsis

A 90 minute feature documentary telling the compelling story of the 40th Irish Dancing World Championships.

Thousands of dancers, their families and teachers from around the globe descend on Glasgow, Scotland for a drama-filled seven days.

Wigs, make-up, tans, diamantes and dresses costing thousands of pounds combined with blood, sweat and tears: 364 days of incredibly hard work and practice for just a few tense minutes on stage. From little ten year-olds upwards they're all competing to win a coveted World Title.

Synopsis

King Dong offers a vhs-tinted glimpse into the mind of comedy filmmaking obscurity Len Cella, who for forty years has strove to make the lowest-brow films and videos with all the seriousness of an auteur.

Synopsis

An epic 12 year journey into in the world of an Irish Traveller community, Knuckle takes us inside their brutal, secretive and exhilarating bare-knuckle fighting lives.
 
Chronicling a history of violent feuding between rival families, the story focuses on two brothers as they fight for their reputations and the honour of their family name.

Synopsis

Reggae, Punk and Bhangra musicians from the UK city of Birmingham discuss their distinctive musical styles and reflect on how music has played its own role in fostering a new sense of collective identity in the city. Including interviews and archives from Steel Pulse, UB40, Swami, Au Pairs and Nightingales.

Synopsis

Nothing Is Impossible is a portrait of Fauja Singh: a 98 year-old long distance runner who keeps running. He holds the fastest over 90 year-old marathon race time, and he defies perceived notions of age with a twinkle in his eye and an infectious zest for life.

Synopsis

In just a few years, the Afghan cricket team has risen from obscurity in the sport’s lowest ranks to phenomenal success in the highly competitive international arena. This is the remarkable and inspirational story of coach Taj Malik Aleem and his team, who became the sport’s unlikeliest heroes during a triumphant campaign culminating in the crucial World Cup qualifier in South Africa. In a country more often associated with war and rigged elections, their incredible journey is an absolute joy to behold.

Synopsis

From the Oscar-winning team behind 'Man on Wire' comes the story of Nim, the chimpanzee who in the mid-1970s became the focus of a landmark experiment which aimed to show that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child.
 
Following Nim's extraordinary journey through human society, and the enduring impact he makes on the people he meets along the way, the film is an unflinching and unsentimental biography of an animal we tried to make human. What we learn about his true nature - and indeed our own - is comic, revealing and profoundly unsettling.

Synopsis

Reagan follows the 40th president's rise from small-town lifeguard to revered architect of the modern world. This definitive look at man and myth investigates how Reagan's homespun political vision fueled a seismic career, one whose reverberations still shape American life.

Synopsis

Robinson in Ruins is an account of a journey by a wandering, erratic scholar, through landscapes in the south of England. Its fictional narration begins: 'When a man called Robinson was released from Edgcott open prison, he made his way to the nearest city, and looked for somewhere to haunt'.

Robinson ‘believed he could communicate with a network of non-human intelligences determined to preserve the possibility of life’s survival on the planet’ and ‘was equipped with an ancient ciné camera, with which he made images of his everyday surroundings’. He surveyed the centre of the island on which he was shipwrecked: 'The location,' he wrote, 'of a Great Malady, that I shall dispel, in the manner of Turner, by making picturesque views, on journeys to sites of scientific and historic interest.'

The film consists of these views. The cinematography began in January 2008 and continued until November, just after the peak of that year’s global banking crisis. The film’s unplanned journey ‘rediscovers’ several locations associated with capitalism’s development since the 16th century and resistance to it. Vanessa Redgrave’s narration includes references to the deepening economic crisis, climate change and mass-extinction, but manages to reach an optimistic conclusion.

Synopsis

Artist Gillian Wearing places an ad asking, 'Would you like to be in a film? You can play yourself or a fictional character'.
 
Her film 'Self Made' documents the intense, revealing and sometimes disturbing experiences of seven people who sign up for the project. They take part in a series of workshops led by Method acting teacher Sam Rumbelow, who uses different techniques to help them access their memories and personal experiences so that each participant can create a vivid and authentic moment of performance. Gradually, we see five members of the group working towards their own individual end scenes, filmed dramatic vignettes that directly emerge from their personal histories. The scenes range from episodes of violence, to images of imagined love, via an excerpt from Shakespeare's King Lear. As the lights finally go off in the studio, the participants leave the experiment having for the first time confronted and articulated deep truths about themselves.

Synopsis

Twelve year-old Fazilla deals daily with the hardships of selling chewing gum on the streets and the discrimination Afghan girls face. However, when she is skateboarding, she forgets all her problems.

Murza is a 16 year-old who has known nothing but a life of war. But through participation in the Skateistan project, he has been able to give up working at a car wash and now has high hopes for both himself and his country's future. 

Skateistan: To Live And Skate Kabul is a beautiful, verite style, 16mm film about the lives of 2 young skateboarders from Afghanistan. The Skateistan project is Afghanistan's first co-educational skateboarding school. In a country with innumerable problems, Skateistan represents an oasis where children can be children and build the kinds of cross-cultural relationships that Afghanistan needs for future stability. Intimate and challenging in its portrayal of children's stories and stunningly shot, Skateistan: To Live And Skate Kabul is a touching ray of light from a country only ever in the news for all the wrong reasons.

Synopsis

Over the last five years an independent record shop has closed in the UK every three days. Sound It Out is a documentary portrait of the very last surviving vinyl record shop in Teesside, North East England.

A cultural haven in one of the most deprived areas in the UK, SOUND IT OUT documents a place that is thriving against the odds and the local community that keeps it alive.

Directed by Jeanie Finlay who grew up three miles from the shop. A distinctive, funny and intimate film about men, the North and the irreplaceable role music plays in our lives.