Projects in categories: Documentary

Synopsis

Cinema Has Been My True Love: The Work and Times of Lynda Myles

In Mark Cousins’ meditative documentary, Lynda Myles, an influential connoisseur of cinema, reflects on her adventures in the film culture she helped establish. From 1973 to 1980, as the first female director of any festival, Myles transformed the Edinburgh Film Festival into a vibrant, iconoclastic mecca of discovery, championing the work of overlooked auteurs including Hitchcock, Sirk and Sam Fuller.
Official selection Telluride Film Festival 2023 - World premiere

Synopsis

Told by the pioneering women who participated, this is the extraordinary story of the unofficial 1971 Women's World Cup, a football tournament witnessed by record crowds that has been written out of sporting history - until now.
Official Selection Toronto International Film Festival 2023 - World premiere
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2023

Synopsis

The heroic story of young orphaned girls whose music school was closed after the Taliban took over Afghanistan, as they escape to Portugal to try and rebuild their fractured lives and begin to play music again.
Official Selection Telluride Film Festival 2023 - World premiere

Synopsis

A live cinema performance about a world where global cultures are nearing extinction. The protagonists are led by Meenakshi, a ‘cultural cyborg’ built to preserve Indian heritage and create harmony through Indian performative traditions. The immersive visuals consist of 3D video games, AI art and motion captured dance, while presenting an anthology of stories from India in 2079 AD, following a motley crew who playfully connect heritage, science and society through the lens of emergent Indian electro-classical dance music.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2023

Synopsis

GHOSTS OF SOLID AIR is an experiential Augmented Reality (AR) story that you do on your phone - Voices guide you on a journey from Trafalgar Square to the Houses of Parliament. As you move, you encounter a ghost world layered right on top of us all the time - shadows who shimmer in and out vision, haunting the streets and whispering messages into the air. These are people from across time who were radicalised through personal experience and forced into disobedient action.
Obey those in charge at your peril, they say. Speak up! And you will be heard. Through an encounter with those who have been pushed beyond their tipping point - this experience asks: where does disobedience come from? And is it for love or rage that we break peace with the conditions of now? Walk with the ghosts - and decide for yourself.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2023

Synopsis

Political engagement spawned the wildest of wonderlands for Hong Kong’s creativity – but as a new law annihilates freedom of expression overnight, artists and creatives find themselves targets and their works disappeared. We race to preserve the creative uprising amid China’s crackdown.
In June 2020, the day after the National Security Law was imposed, the government started listing words, images, books, slogans, songs that were now deemed illegal - making so much that was ‘normal', forbidden.
Hong Kong Mixtape weaves in the personal story of San the director, as we immerse with these underground artists, including some of Asia’s most famous and iconic creators - rappers, dancers, performers, illustrators, stunt collectives - as they navigate this authoritarian new normal. We also follow San having to ask herself the same questions as the other artists; are you willing to risk a life sentence for your art? And if this the last time we can be home - what do we make now?
Official Selection Glasgow Film Festival 2023 - European Premiere

Synopsis

An exploratory documentary centred on an historic nonconformist chapel located at the edge of the Pennine moors in Northern England.

Synopsis

During the winter of 1969, young boys started to disappear from the streets of Belfast, never to be seen again. By 1974, as the Troubles were reaching a bloody and vicious peak, five boys in total had vanished within a five-mile radius. Fifty years later, as the disappearances remain unsolved and families continue to search for answers, filmmaker Des Henderson (How to Defuse a Bomb) reopens these largely forgotten cold-cases, unearthing disturbing revelations in secret state documents to tell an extraordinary tale of abuse, trauma and potential cover-up.
Official selection Belfast International Film Festival and Irish Film Institute Documentary Festival 2023 - World premiere

Synopsis

A quietly poignant domestic film made of images gathered around the house and its surroundings over a two-year period. The title might seem self-explanatory, we do see pillows, bowls, roses, trees – but also curtains, tablecloths, saucers, other trees and flowers (in the garden and arranged on vases). We sense the changing seasons and we sense a lived-in space – one that is shared as the pillow arrangements suggest. Working with a Bolex camera involves a tension between the technology and the world surrounding the filmmaker, the maximum shot length is limited to around 20 seconds because of the windup spring motor. (Open City Documentary Festival programme).
Official Selection Open City Documentary Festival 2023

Synopsis

Stumbling across the perfect wave, two surfers start a chain reaction of unintended consequences. Perfection comes at a cost. Changed forever by the discovery of a ‘perfect wave’ in the 1970’s, POINT OF CHANGE chronicles the first surfers to ‘discover' this point at Nias island, Indonesia, and the unintended dramatic consequences that followed.
When two young surfers from Australia want to escape the political climate of their home in the 1970s, they set off in search of their idea of ’santosha’; a perfect location with a perfect wave. Their dream came true and they found their holy grail when they stumbled across Lagundi Bay, on the remote island of Nias in Indonesia. Unwittingly Kevin Lovett and John Giesel were the new colonials wearing different hats, walking into an entirely different culture and community, completely unaware of the dramatic consequences and the devastating social and ecological repercussions for the people and place that followed. A contemporary, cautionary tale of paradise lost.
Official Selection Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2024 - US Premiere

Synopsis

A Magic Realist Documentary.
The film weaves together real and mythical events to create connections between the history of the Crystal Palace in London and the sculpture called Psyche Abandoned. The story reveals how a moment in the life of a young woman called Psyche was captured in marble and travelled through time and space to sit in the same park overlooking South London for the last 170 years, while world wars, fires, explosions, royalty, music events, funfairs and circuses have rushed past her in endless succession.
This ‘moment’ is the only constant in a story of splendour and spectacle, and like all the best stories, if only half of it is true it is still an incredible tale.

Synopsis

David Cornwell, aka spy novelist John le Carré, opens up to Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris in what was to be the author’s final and most personal interview. Spanning six decades, from a stormy Cold War backdrop extending into the present day, the film is punctuated with rare archival footage and dramatic anecdotes, including reflections on the influences Cornwell/ le Carré took from his father’s life as a con man.
Official Selection Telluride Film Festival 2023 - World premiere
Official Selection Toronto International Film Festival
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival - European premiere