Projects in categories: Documentary

Synopsis

A smartphone feature exploring motherhood, filmed over 20 years by BAFTA award-winning British director Victoria Mapplebeck. At the age of 38, Victoria Mapplebeck found herself single, pregnant and broke. Unable to combine motherhood with freelance directing, she was forced to abandon her career in TV, instead turning the camera on herself and her son, Jim. Victoria first began documenting their lives with her old DVCAM before shooting almost daily on five generations of smartphones, from the iPhone 6 to the iPhone 15. She recorded hundreds of hours of footage, capturing each twist and turn in Jim’s life, from the thumbs-up he gave her during her first scan, to his first day at college.
MOTHERBOARD is a complex, personal and unsentimental portrait of a mother-son relationship from birth to adulthood, exploring the ways in which Victoria and Jim navigate two generations of absent fathers and Victoria’s breast cancer diagnosis when Jim was just 13. The warm, playful and sometimes strained relationship between Victoria and Jim plays out against a backdrop of family life unfiltered.
MOTHERBOARD is the antidote to the judgmental and unrealistic expectations we have about motherhood, creating an honest, funny and relatable film for any mother who has wept tears of both joy and frustration.
Official selection CPH:DOX Film Festival 2024 - World Premiere
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2024

Synopsis

Having depleted their wells, off-shore platforms await final decommissioning. Nearby on land, a yearly burning of oil takes place.

Synopsis

Unfolding at the nexus of immersive technology, creative storytelling and wellbeing, SOUL PAINT delves into the richness of the embodied human experience.
Official Selection SXSW Film Festival 2024 - XR Experience Competition - World premiere
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2024

Synopsis

Combing anonymous documentary testimony with imagined creative scenes to tell the stories of those who have called the oldest queer support line in the UK, seeking guidance on everything from where to find the nearest leather club to how to come out, start a family or mend a broken heart. The film is a love letter to queer memory and possibility, LGBTQ+ community and care, and the power of collective imagination.
Official Selection Frameline San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival 2024

Synopsis

Iraqi medical anthropologist Dr. Omar Dewachi unearths how Acinetobacter baumannii went from a benign bacteria, to a “perfect killer”, also known by its US moniker ‘Iraqibacter’ or the ‘invisible enemy’, and how the consequences of war can drive pathogens, which threaten the viability of antibiotics, and our health, globally.
Official Selection CPH:DOX 2024 - World premiere

Synopsis

An intimate, expressive film about how endometriosis has robbed Georgie Wileman of time. Told in the first-person and blending present-day narrative with memories from the past, the film is a uniquely personal account with unprecedented access.

Synopsis

Life, death and making meaning are the heart of a beautiful and often very funny film about an ageing couple who, after an accident, face the inevitability of impermanence and seek a deep peace in their relationship while they still can.
Thirty years after a chance encounter, Maggie and Joel, aged 75 and 84, are still very much in love. But their relationship is not without complications. Born in the hard-boiled Bronx, Joel Meyerowitz is a world-renowned photographer with major exhibitions and 40 books to his name. British-born Maggie Barrett is a talented but less recognised artist and writer. There is a knot of unease in their relationship, which is further strained when Maggie falls and breaks her leg and Joel must take on her caregiving. In the shadow of mortality, each with a long and dramatic life behind them, the hard truths of life together provoke in Maggie and Joel an attempt to find a shared inner peace while there is still time. With unique access to the couple's lives, directors Jacob Perlmutter and Manon Ouimet have created a profoundly moving film about living, creating and loving.
Official Selection CPH:DOX 2024 - World premiere
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2024

Synopsis

Structuring this intimate and insightful portrait of Lynda Myles, academic Susan Kemp invokes a form known to define, criticise, and shift paradigms in culture – the manifesto. Meshing archival material with interview subjects including Jim Hickey and B. Ruby Rich, Kemp employs a series of provocations to tease out the philosophy behind a lifetime of ground-breaking film work. In the film's central conversation, Myles beautifully expresses the thrill of putting on a show (including the 1972 Women's Event, pioneering retrospectives of Douglas Sirk, Sam Fuller and Raoul Walsh and many more) while always avoiding the polite.
This vivid filmic manifesto is an active document set to inspire anyone who programmes, produces or simply loves cinema today. (Kate Taylor)
Official selection Dublin International Film Festival 2024 - UK premiere

Synopsis

Producing, writing, and directing, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger created some of great classics of the British golden age including The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. In the words of Martin Scorsese their films were “grand, poetic, wise, adventurous, headstrong, enraptured by beauty, deeply romantic, and completely uncompromising”.
Scorsese takes the audience on a very personal journey as we hear how, from a young age he was captivated by their films, how they helped shape his own filmmaking and how a later friendship with Michael Powell left an indelible mark on his own life. Brought to life with rare archival material from the personal collections of Powell, Pressburger and Scorsese, the story is told using diaries, audio recordings, home movies, personal snapshots and of course the films themselves.
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2024 - Berlin Special - World premiere
Official Selection Tribeca Film Festival 2024

Synopsis

SOMEONE'S DAUGHTER, SOMEONE'S SON is the most recent film from director Lorna Tucker, maker of the acclaimed WESTWOOD: PUNK, ICON, ACTIVIST.
Narrated by Colin Firth, the film tells the story of three main characters who have lived on the street.
As well as moving personal stories, in a surprising narrative twist in the film, we see projects across the UK which are helping to address the causes of street homelessness and we meet experts who help us understand the root causes of rough sleeping and what can be done to stop it. It is a film which is moving, enlightening and enraging and aims to change public attitudes to homelessness — showing how easy it is to slip into it and how all of the homeless are someone’s daughter or someone’s son.

Synopsis

The race to get a climate change act for Northern Ireland. Usually laws are written by anonymous civil servants in government departments, Northern Ireland’s first climate change bill was developed by activists, NGOs and academics. Members of the Climate Coalition Northern Ireland tell the nail biting story of their battle with a minister determined to deny, delay and distort their bill. A glorious mixture of humour, contemporary footage, animations and heartfelt testimony brings to life a narrative from Northern Ireland for once not mired in the violence of the troubles.

Synopsis

A speculative narrative that takes place in a future of the past, in a present ruptured now. An intimate exploration of grief and resistance across diasporic distance in shifting landscapes of loss, from the streets to the bed; in sites of displacement, nuclear contamination, and military occupation from Scotland to Puerto Rico; from the bottom of the ocean to the planet Uranus.
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2024 - Forum Expanded - World premiere