Projects in categories: Documentary

Synopsis

At midnight on 22nd October 2019, marriage equality rights were extended to Northern Ireland. With no sitting government in Stormont for three years, the law was passed through Westminster, much to the horror of the evangelical Christian right and their flagship political party, the DUP.
Meanwhile, in a quiet corner of east Belfast, a radical theatre group was in the process of creating the world’s first ever ‘documentary opera’. Led by enigmatic artistic director Conor Mitchell, The Belfast Ensemble were taking every homophobic phrase said by DUP politicians over the past 40 years, and putting them to music, verbatim.

Synopsis

The Nye family, who arrived in London from Australia in the '60s, were passionate about horses. They established a stable in Hyde Park, and have been doing a remarkable work at the community level for decades. They contributed to democratizing riding in the city, passing their dream from generation to generation. The camera captures the day-to-day routines and challenges of life at Ross Nye Stables with humour and poetry.

Premiere at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival 2021

Synopsis

An exiled Venezuelan director returns to his collapsing country to make a fiction film based on his own self-destructive father, who he casts to play himself. Father and son venture to the Amazon jungle, revisiting past traumas in a country that offers them no future. EL FATHER PLAYS HIMSELF explores the ways a son who left and a father who stayed face the pains of their past and the uncertainty of their future, all through the catharsis of making a film.

Synopsis

Christmas 1979, the height of The Cold War; Dave Evans' grandfather visits the family in South Wales and brings with him a mysterious young woman from Bulgaria. When grandad and his friend leave a few days later it will be the last the family ever see of him.

Dave investigates his grandfather's disappearance and uncovers the story of how his family living in a small village in Wales were dragged into a web of Cold War intrigue and dirty dealings in high places.

Synopsis

The Hippies were a bizarre English punk band formed in '79 by the Hulse children, Toby (12), Matt (11) and Polly (8). Their cassette album 'A Sound for the Future' featured songs about disease, assassination and the Antarctic.
"Stop eating toast and singeing your legs by the gas fire. Get up and do something!" (Ruth Pendragon, Mother, Manager, Guru), 1979. The Hippies performed ticketed live shows for their mother’s kindly but chaotic group of Cambridge friends; the homeless, drunks, animal rights activists, junkies, cross-dressers and gay Franciscan friars.

The Hippies then and now. What truly happened back in the past and whose side of the story should be told? Especially as the film’s director was the band's 11-year-old drummer? Matt’s mum Ruth, maverick, mystic, manager, plays a pivotal role in the bigger picture, offering an insight into a time of personal and social upheaval, both for her and her family in Thatcher’s Britain.

Using music of the period, archive, animation and poetic reimaginings of key moments, Matt Hulse explores a part-remembered, kaleidoscopically fractured, family history, through an energetic, jarring, ride; part performance, part art, part process, post-punk.

Synopsis

Bill Clinton’s strange legacy as President of the United States and ringmaster of the 1990s is a confounding mess of public amnesia, nostalgia, and scorn. WILLIAM JEFFERSON WILDERNESS is a personal exploration that legacy, and of the tangled process of consigning a former political hero to history.

DOK Leipzig • International Competition • World Premiere
St. Louis International Film Festival • Official Selection
Florida Film Festival • Sunspots: New Visions of the Avant Garde

Synopsis

Edgar Combrink, a perpetual re-offender, is released back to the gang ridden Cape Flats to a family he hardly knows. To a forgotten suburb rife with unemployment and social decay in one of the most unequal cities in the world; Cape Town. Now that his daughter is starting high school, he needs to resist the ever present pull of crime, if he wants to see her graduate.

Synopsis

This film follows a personal and intimate journey exploring the repression experienced by the filmmaker during her childhood when she faced sexual control in Damascus. Through the creative use of family archive mixed with current footage of her body she reconstructs the pain of the past absorbed by her body.

Synopsis

Former Guantánamo detainee, Mohamedou Ould Salahi, and his guard, Steve Wood, reunite in Mauritania 13 years after last seeing each other, rekindling an unlikely relationship that profoundly changed their lives.
Official Selection Tribeca Film Festival 2020 - World premiere
Official Selection Camerimage 2020

Synopsis

The importance of disco dancing in Northern Ireland's working class community.

Synopsis

SHY RADICALS is a portrait of Hamja Ahsan and the story behind his book and satirical manifesto, which calls for all shy, quiet, and introverted people to unify and overthrow Extrovert-Supremacy.
A work that blurs the boundaries between reality and an imagined world in which Ahsan is a leading character.

Synopsis

SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS is the remarkable untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers, composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly transform how we produce and listen to music today.

The film maps a new history of electronic music through the visionary women whose radical experimentations with machines redefined the boundaries of music, including Clara Rockmore, Daphne Oram, Bebe Barron, Pauline Oliveros, Delia Derbyshire, Maryanne Amacher, Eliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani, and Laurie Spiegel.

Official Selection SXSW Festival 2020 - 24 Beats Per Second - World premiere
Official Selection Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 - Rhyme and Rhythm - European premiere