Projects in categories: Documentary

Synopsis

A real war story is not the story of men at war. A haunting encounter with a boy injured by a random bullet sends director Carol Dysinger to investigate what happened to him, who fired the shot, who is responsible? During her fifteen years following the war in Afghanistan, she often finds herself behind the curtains of an Afghan home where Bibi Hajji maintains her extended family – struggling with her grief and her remaining sons' anger and pain at the loss of their brother. ONE BULLET evolves from a procedural to an excavation of human loss and the redemption of female friendship. How do we deal with guilt and injury across vast social, cultural and religious divides? Ask two tough old broads drinking tea.
Official Selection Galway Film Fleadh 2023 - World Cinema Competition -European premiere - Winner Best International Documentary

Synopsis

During the Pink Moon season, a daughter revisits her childhood home to work the garden with her father as it blossoms in the politically and physically divided island of Cyprus. It once facilitated her nightmares of the conflict and now their conversations. The filmmaker unearths the inter-generational trauma and healing.
Official Selection Edinburgh International Film Festival 2023 - Bridging the Gap - World premiere
Official Selection DOC NYC 2024

Synopsis

Ruth was barely a teenager when her mother passed down her Medallion, etched with a golden portrait of Nefertiti. A symbol of beauty and strength. Not only was this medallion an artefact, it was an emblem of her mother’s inconceivable plight; captured in middle school by the Derg communist military regime and raised in a prison camp for years, separated from her family.
This story follows Ruth's mother's early memories of the Derg Genocide and how she first became in possession of the medallion upon her escape. The medallion symbolised her freedom and was passed down to Ruth for her to pass on to her children and to keep her family and country’s story alive.
Official Selection DOC NYC 2023 - North American premiere
Official Selection Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival 2024

Synopsis

Yuliia has become a refugee in Scotland due to the war in Ukraine. She is fighting for the future of her children while trying to maintain her relationship with her husband, who is on the frontline.
Edinburgh International Film Festival 2023 Bridging the Gap - World premiere

Synopsis

Based on the award-winning book ‘Scala Cinema 1978-1993’ by Jane Giles (FAB Press, 2018) this feature-length big screen documentary tells the riotous inside story of the infamous sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll rep house which inspired a generation during Britain's turbulent Thatcher years.
The film combines 50 new interviews with diverse audience members who went on to become filmmakers, musicians, writers, actors and artists, combined with previously unseen archive material and iconic movie clips.
With its universal themes of youthful discovery and the underdog vs. the establishment, this is no nostalgia trip but rather a film of universal relevance with clear parallels between then and now. Above all, it's a hilarious and joyous celebration of cinema-going.
Official Selection Il Cinema Ritrovato Bologna 2023 - World premiere
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2023

Synopsis

Noel Coward was one of the most important figures of the 20th Century. He was not only a great playwright, but also one of the best songwriters, directors and performers. Coward’s triumphs across theatre, film and music mark him out as one of only a handful of artists whose mastery has moulded the spirit of a nation.
And yet he grew up poor, left school when he was only eleven and was full of contradictions – he was a sex symbol who was gay, a rebel who was also a patriot, his plays were set in glamorous drawing rooms while he lived in the smallest room in his mother’s boarding house. He was a true star, who had a style and character that personified the very idea of Englishness. And yet he ended his life in exile from the country he came to define.
He was an extraordinary man that led an extraordinary life.

Synopsis

An ancient monolith stands sentinel in a Cornish field for millennia. Part provocation, part meditation, part invocation, BAFTA-winning documentarian Christopher Morris’s A YEAR IN A FIELD is a record of their brief interaction.
Morris invites us to slow down, as he films for a year in a West Cornwall field; to immerse ourselves in this quiet, direct-action of stillness, to take a breath and reflect on the planetary impacts of our brief human existence, under the watchful gaze of the Longstone, a 4,000-year-old standing stone that predominates this elemental landscape.
From Winter Solstice 2020 to Winter Solstice 2021, a string of unprecedented worldwide climate disasters, met by weak global political resolve, are revealed as just fleeting moments, under the ever-present unflinching granite gaze of the Longstone.
As the wheel of the year turns, Morris’s ecosophical polemic unearths a mythic reality buried just below the furrowed soil of our consumerist age, suggesting, perhaps, that whilst time may feel like it’s running away at an ever-increasing rate, it’s not too late to pause, reflect, and change.
Official Selection Sheffield DocFest 2023 - World premiere
Official Selection Zurich Film Festival 2023 - International premiere

Synopsis

In December 2018, a young pansexual man from the slums of Jamaica became the first non British and black man to win the UK X-Factor and a million-pound album deal that promised to change his life forever. Filmed over two years, this documentary follows 24-year-old Dalton Harris as he searches for fame, love and acceptance and tries to capitalise on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to achieve his dream. Charting an extraordinary rise, the film follows Dalton winning the world’s most famous talent competition, starting a lavish life in London, falling in love with his new boyfriend and launching his first single on national UK television to1.7 million viewers...
Official Selection Sheffield DocFest 2023 - World premiere

Synopsis

BAFTA-winning filmmakers Bruce Fletcher and Peter Beard follow their close friend Otto Baxter, a man with Down Syndrome, through a year of change as he writes and directs his first film; an allegorical horror biopic set in Victorian London charting the life of a monster baby on the rocky path to escape incarceration and become his own master.
Otto has recently experienced bereavement and family health scares that have forced him to think about mortality for the first time – his own and those closest to him. Otto has always turned to films to make sense of the world, and this moment is no exception. Through the writing and directing process, he finds the vocabulary to process his past and imagine his uncertain future. He tackles his demons head on, but always with a riotous sense of humour. Otto’s extraordinary upbringing has meant his life has always played out on camera to some extent. This rich archive will be blended with drama and present day footage in this intimate documentary, to tell the compelling story of Otto and his family, placing it firmly in the context of the UK’s evolving attitudes to disability over his lifetime.
Official Selection Sheffield DocFest 2023 - World premiere

Synopsis

The extraordinary untold story of how a pioneering group of American women, from very different walks of life, fought to break into the most macho sport of all: boxing.
In their day, Marian 'Lady Tyger' Trimiar, Cathy 'Cat' Davis and 'Pretty' Pat Pineda were famous, earning headlines as they battled against sexist 1970s society for the right to fight. But today, they live anonymously, and in many cases, in poverty - their groundbreaking contributions to sport ignored by the men who've written boxing history.
RIGHT TO FIGHT uncovers the hidden origins of women's boxing, and the remarkable story of the pioneering women who put their lives of the line to earn the right to fight each other in the ring. This is an inspirational story, but it is not a hagiography - the narrative takes dark and surprising twists and turns as the women's stories unfold in unexpected ways.
Official Selection Sheffield DocFest 2023 - World premiere

Synopsis

Ste Giddings grew up with addictions in himself and those around him. At 26 he was giving up on life. STEPHEN is a film-within-a-film that combines narrative fiction with real-life observation and archive material. It takes us on intimate journeys into two characters as Ste auditions for and takes on a role in a fiction film. Produced with a mixed cast of people in addiction/recovery alongside four professional actors, the film presents alternative perspectives on urgent social questions including alcohol/drug misuse, gambling and mental health. As fiction merges with reality the separation between person, actor and character at times dissolves.
Official Selection Sheffield DocFest 2023 - World premiere

Synopsis

Exploring an untold part of UK history when over 70,000 children from West African families, principally Nigerian, were unofficially fostered without regulation into white British families between the 1950s and 1990s, to help combat the issue of childcare for economic migrants.
Official Selection Sheffield DocFest 2023 - UK premiere
BAFTA TV Awards 2024 - Winner - Specialist Factual