Projects in categories: Documentary

Synopsis

Exploring the dying whistling traditions of the Hmong people of northern Laos, whose sonic exchanges straddle the boundary between music and speech. The film follows the personal stories of three individuals from Long Lan village, as they reflect on their experience as practitioners of a vanishing musical language. Official Selection Aesthetica Film Festival 2022 Official Selection SXSW Film Festival 2023

Synopsis

A story gleaned from material collected over a lifetime. Lisa Selby, an artist and lecturer, has always documented her life in paint, words, photographs and film. As Lisa struggles to comprehend why her mother Helen didn’t raise her, Helen dies. Helen was charismatic, articulate, beautiful and addicted to heroin. Lisa now begins to get to know the woman she never called Mother, through the things she left behind and the memories of people who knew her. Lisa’s partner, Elliot, relapses on heroin and is incarcerated. Through her own sobriety and her love for Elliot, Lisa comes to understand addiction, and Helen, differently. She also uncovers a new possibility towards motherhood deep within herself. Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2023 - World premiere - Audience Award - Winner Official Selection Thessaloniki Documentary Festival 2023 - International premiere - Film Forward Competition Golden Alexander - Winner

Synopsis

A short animated documentary that explores the experience of telling the world that you are autistic when you also identify as LGBTQ+. Official Selection Kaboom Animation Festival 2023

Synopsis

“Difficult roads often lead to beautiful destinations” This travel documentary explores, Rajasthan state in India as a paradox through the lens of Myths and its cultural Mood. Threading 6 cities in 3 chapters to form one narrative. Chapter 1: Power of Beliefs We experience ancient rituals in a tribal village with a transcendental congregation (Banswara) and a pre-historic city (Pushkar) where Lord Brahma was cursed. Chapter 2: Lessons in Humility In Udaipur, we hear stories from a royal aide of servitude of the longest reigning royal family in the world since 934 AD. While in Ajmer, we hear from the descendent of a Sufi Mystic and how he had humbled a great Mughal Emperor. Chapter 3: Women Power In Jodhpur (blue city), we witness the palace archives to understand the virtues of Old Queens.While in Jaisalmer(Golden city), we meet a present day princess on how she has been a patron of music and education in the desert state with one of the only inhabited forts in the world.

Synopsis

Have you ever fallen in love with a tree? When the residents of the Woodberry Down Estate in Hackney, London, find out that a property developer has been given permission to fell a much-loved 150-year-old London Plane street tree - which even has its own name, the 'Happy Man Tree' - they start a campaign to try to save it. The film charts the ups and downs of the nine-month David and Goliath battle from the point of view of the brave and endlessly creative local activists who range from 7-year-old Lucas to 82-year-old Sylvia who has lived on the estate for 60 years. This is an innovatively-made grassroots-style film with the charismatic Happy Man Tree as its central character.

Synopsis

In our wealthiest nations, old age homelessness is on the rise and so is the number of pensioners using foodbanks. Is Old Age Poverty an unstoppable global disaster? With a unique mix of comedy animation, interviews with experts and personal stories from all around the world, YOUR HUNDRED-YEAR LIFE explains how we got ourselves into this mess and what we can do to get out of it.

Synopsis

In 1968, art students Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey “Po” Powell made a trippy photo collage for their musician friends Syd, David and Roger. The resulting album and album cover, 'A Saucerful of Secrets', helped launch two careers: that of Pink Floyd, one of the 70s megabands, and of Hipgnosis, which, over the course of the next 25 years, designed a stream of iconic album covers. Photographer, filmmaker and designer Anton Corbijn fills his Hipgnosis history with case studies of album art from Pink Floyd’s 'Dark Side of the Moon', considered by many to be the greatest album art of all time, to Led Zeppelin’s mind-altering 'Houses of the Holy'. Fuelled by Powell's vivid storytelling, Corbijn captures the energy of a team making iconoclastic art amidst one of the most hedonistic eras in music history. Official Selection Telluride Film Festival 2022 - World premiere Official Selection Sundance Film Festival 2023

Synopsis

An exploration of dance as a way to ease coming off anti-depressants. The film is a journey of sorts from isolation to connection, and an artistic montage of city life, revolving around the theme of dance. BAFTA Film Awards 2023 - Nomination - Best British Short Film

Synopsis

A road movie in search of the work of renowned Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa. The film follows a protagonist scouring the island for the ‘lost’ garden of Lunuganga. Finding the treasure might be the goal, yet her search is the catalyst for encounters with a series of characters and rarely visited buildings that reveal the story of Bawa’s life and work.

Synopsis

Set in the mid '90s Indi charts the world of emigre mother, Sheeru, and her British born son Indi, who dreams of playing professional football.

Synopsis

KANAVAL is a visually arresting feature documentary that is set in the present but tells the rich story of Haiti’s past, as we follow a number of carnival performers in the lead up to and during the annual Jacmel Mardi Gras. These performers relate their own personal histories as well as the stories of their carnival characters, representing moments and people from the distant and not so distant Haitian past. This is not a carnival of sequins and sound systems found elsewhere in the Caribbean, but a celebration of rebellion and resistance resonating through the centuries. Whatever Jacmel carnival lacks in glitz and spectacle, it makes up for in home-grown surrealism and poetic metaphors. The lives of the indigenous Taino Indians, the Slaves’ Revolt of 1791, the establishment of Haiti as the western hemisphere’s first Black Republic in 1804, the debt forced upon Haiti by the French, and more recently state corruption are all played out using drama and costume on Jacmel’s streets during Carnival - or ‘Kanaval’ in Haitian Kreyol.

Synopsis

We meet Mary DeBoutez Zellmer Fenoglio in 2008. She is a loud, charismatic and complex woman in her sixties, born and raised in rural Kansas, USA. She has dreams; of becoming an artist and one day leaving Kansas. Living with her husband and surrounded by her herd of cats, Mary runs a vibrant roadside curiosity shop out of her front yard and builds giant eye-catching furniture. But rising gas prices have caused business to slump. We meet Mary’s friends, neighbours and close-knit family and learn about events that have impacted her life; the poverty of her upbringing, the death of her baby son, a domineering ex-husband and the effects of an abusive father. Against these odds she remains positive, energetic and hopeful. We return 10 years later to find Mary struggling to come to terms with what’s happened in her life in the intervening years. Her beloved husband Kenny has died, as well as her brother and sister, and her business has all but ceased to exist. Just when she’s at her lowest ebb, she’s introduced to Rusty, a local contractor, and the possibility of a new relationship gives her a glimpse of happiness that she thought had gone forever.