Projects in categories: Documentary

Synopsis

For eight years, 68-year-old Louise has been looking after her mum Rita, who is 92 and living with dementia. As both women grapple with Rita’s rapidly deteriorating condition, Louise must decide the best path forward for both herself and her mother.

Synopsis

When a Filipino victim of modern slavery in the UK stops responding, her rescuers fear the worst. By exploring their own memories and experiences of slavery, her would-be rescuers find strength in their community and resolve to save her.
Official Selection SXSW Film Festival 2024 - International premiere

Synopsis

As Carnival approaches, three Samba drummers reflect on the impacts of parental upbringing and the freeing effects of the artform on their lives.

Synopsis

How far would you go to defend the idea of an open press? This documentary is the extraordinary story of a man who risks everything to preserve freedom of speech in Russia.
In December 2021 Dmitry Muratov is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He is the editor-in-chief of Russia’s only independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta. Six of his journalists have been murdered, after their reports displeased the state. In February 2022 Russia invades Ukraine. In early March, using the cover of a documentary film festival, Muratov secretly negotiates free passage for forty journalists with the Latvian government. Then he returns to Moscow to look after his paper and its remaining staff. In May he announces that he is going to auction his Nobel medal and give the money to Ukrainian refugees. Days later, he is on a train. Suddenly a masked attacker pours red paint all over him. The paint is laced with acetone. Dima’s eyesight is permanently damaged. Undaunted, he goes ahead with the auction. And on June 21 Muratov’s medal sells for a record $103 million. To this day, he refuses to leave Moscow, whatever the pressure on him and his team. "Putin stands for death. I stand for life."
Official Selection Sheffield DocFest 2023 - World premiere

Synopsis

Tish Murtha was a photographer whose images of people on the margins of society in 1970s Newcastle challenged and documented the inequality she herself lived through and wanted desperately to escape. However, despite early acclaim for her work she was unable to make a living from photography and lived in poverty until her death. In this new feature length documentary we ask: who was Tish Murtha and why did she not receive her due? The documentary will question the value society places on working-class communities and working-class artists, both in the past and the present day.
Official Selection Sheffield DocFest 2023 - World premiere

Synopsis

The past collides with our precarious present in Steve McQueen’s bravura documentary, informed by the book 'Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945)' written by Bianca Stigter. McQueen creates two interlocking portraits: a door-to-door excavation of the Nazi occupation that still haunts his adopted city, and a vivid journey through the last years of pandemic and protest. What emerges is both devastating and life-affirming, an expansive meditation on memory, time, and where we’re headed.
Official Selection Cannes Film Festival 2023 - Special Screenings - World premiere
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2023

Synopsis

Katharine ‘Kate’ Hepburn was definitive and distinctive, a force of nature, a once-in-a generation talent, whose progressive and free-spirited nature defined her roles. She was nominated for twelve Academy Awards, winning a record four for Best Actress. Her life and career were defined by stunning highs and crushing personal lows, but she also remained in control of her own story, and her distinctive defiance and enduring talent make her an icon to generations of women today. As she herself said: “I never realised until lately that women were supposed to be the inferior sex.”
This is a documentary for the outcasts, the misfits, the girls and boys uncomfortable in their own skin, who don’t conform with traditional expectations. It is the universal story of how – like Kate – we must be true to ourselves, not the forces that shape us.

Synopsis

In religious city of Qom-Iran, there are restrictions imposed on women in the name of “sexual-safety.” Hossein grew-up in this context, but as a young boy he found himself victimized, left to carry this secret into adulthood. Now, with the help of his wife Elahe, he is confronting his trauma.

Synopsis

A meditation on the continuing history and emancipatory potential of the Black church as a space of diasporic belonging, affirmation and community organising. The film examines churches as spaces of 'infrapolitics' by exploring the sonic, political, spiritual and existential connections between specific communities.
Official Selection Black Star Film Festival 2023
Official Selection Hot Docs Festival 2023
Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 2024

Synopsis

A story of loss, love and daring escapes across the borders of Europe in WW2. Join Marion Deichmann as she recounts her story of survival during the Holocaust.
Official Selection Venice Biennale 2023
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2023

Synopsis

For 50 years, iconic activist Ted Brown has fought for queer and black identities. But after his partner suffers homophobic abuse in a care home, a devastated Ted questions the impact of his activism.
Official selection Iris Prize LGBTQ+ Film Festival 2023 - World premiere

Synopsis

Title (Year) Director. Place is a documentary in the celebratory style of Free Cinema, displaying an intimate portrait of Alan Goble, an obsessed octogenarian with many interests but one passion: to detail, every film ever made anywhere in the world from the earliest days of cinema to the present. Now a widower, he reflects on his effortful accomplishment, which has been awarded a Guinness Record as the world's largest film-related database. We also observe him in a moment of relaxation, watching over his garden, rewilded more than forty years ago, where, every evening, generations of badgers snuffle for food, and fox cubs play in the long grass. And, through his own movies, we can observe his progress, from a Saturday morning cinema-going childhood through work and marriage to his solitary existence in a book-lined home, where he continues to find solace in his archival activities. It offers the story of his and our time through a close-up view of an unusual, extraordinary, and individual life.