Projects in categories: Documentary

Synopsis

A group of Black people reflect on violence as it relates to institutional racism and what needs to be done to free the Black mind. The group comprised of family members of Black men who have died in police custody or psychiatric units; mental health and legal professionals; activists and artists.

Synopsis

Welcome to the age of cosmic radiation! THE PHANTOM MENACE compiles stories from the recent past of interaction with cosmic rays at ever descending altitudes. Planes crashing, computers malfunctioning and elections going haywire - these were just the prequel to the future.
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2020 - Forum Expanded - World premiere

Synopsis

The Rwandan director Kivu Ruhorahoza decides to film his new movie, 'A Tree Has Fallen', in London. It is to be a stylish drama about Simon, a mysterious Nigerian man (Oris Erhuero), who returns to London to make amends with Anna, his mixed-race lover (Lisa Moorish) and Bruce, Anna’s white ex-husband (Matt Ray Brown).
Progressively, this love triangle mirrors the increasing social and racial tensions in Great Britain and Europe. In parallel to his narrative fiction, Kivu documents these tensions by filming a series of rallies in the streets of London. But inevitably, the ‘hostile environment’ immigration policy of the ruling Conservative Party comes back to haunt the reunited lovers and to disrupt Kivu’s filmmaking effort.
Sensing that his London stay is coming to a forced end, Kivu attends a far right protest to try and understand the rising xenophobia of the Brits and of his character Bruce.
Official Selection IDFA 2019 - IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentary - World premiere

Synopsis

Imagine you’re dreaming, and in your dream you pick a flower in heaven, and then you wake up with the flower in your hand. This is the kind of experience that composer Max Richter hopes to make palpable among the audience for 'Sleep', an eight-hour-long piece of music that explores of the liminal space between wakefulness and sleep, between consciousness and subconsciousness.
Taking as its chronological guide an ambitious outdoor performance of the composition in central Los Angeles, this salubrious film immerses us in the making of the piece, and in the life of its composer. His wife, artist Yulia Mahr, is his mainstay in both his private and professional life. From her words, it’s clear that grand, intense art such as this cannot come into being without some sacrifice.
The film makes palpable the sense of being present at the performance, partly through many visitors’ exquisitely well-formulated descriptions of their experiences. Shots of the audience lying on camping beds - some alone, others entwined with a loved one - low organically into shots of the musicians, interviews and nocturnal city. And all this is accompanied by the enchanting music itself.
Official Selection IDFA 2019 - IDFA Competition for Feature-Length Documentary - World premiere
Official Selection Sundance Film Festival 2020 - Special Events Programme

Synopsis

Exploring the secretive methods used against UK activists and trade unionists. Blacklisted construction workers and activists spied on by the police share their ongoing struggles. Blacklisting in the UK construction industry impacted thousands of workers who were labeled 'troublemakers' for speaking out and secretively denied employment. Activists uncovered alarming links between workplace blacklisting and undercover policing. Solidarity attentively follows meetings between activists and law students, brought together for the film, revealing the determination of a community working together to find a route to justice. The debut feature length film by artist filmmaker Lucy Parker it has been made alongside and features members of Blacklist Support Group, core participants in Undercover Policing Inquiry, and members of other campaigning groups.
Official Selection Sheffield Doc/Fest 2019 - World premiere
Official Selection IDFA 2019 - IDFA Competition for First Appearance - International premiere

Synopsis

Film director Terry Gilliam has been dreaming of a screen adaptation of 'Don Quixote' for over 30 years. When he attempted the first production in 2000, Gilliam already had the reputation of being a bit of a Quixote himself: a filmmaker whose stories of visionary dreamers raging against gigantic forces mirrored his own artistic battles with the Hollywood machine. The collapse of that now-famous, ill-fated production only further cemented Gilliam’s reputation as an idealist chasing an impossible dream.
HE DREAMS OF GIANTS picks up Gilliam’s story 17 years later as he finally gets the film into production and once again and struggles to finish it. Facing him are a host of new obstacles: budget constraints, a history of compromise, and heightened expectations, all compounded by self-doubt, the toll of aging, and the nagging existential question: What is left for an artist when one completes the project that has defined the good part of a career?
Combining immersive verité footage of Gilliam’s production with intimate interviews and archival footage from Gilliam’s entire career, HE DREAMS OF GIANTS is a revealing portrait of a late-career artist and a meditation on the value of creativity in the face of mortality.
Official Selection DOC NYC 2019 - World premiere

Synopsis

a ROLE to PLAY brings together the lived experiences and dreams of Bolsover residents, one of the most deprived towns in the middle of England. The film tells stories of the impact of economic changes in a post-industrial Derbyshire constituency where coal was once king.

Synopsis

An inquiry into proximity and empathy, explored through the working life of a care worker as he builds supportive relationships with three young adults with severe physical disabilities and autism.

Synopsis

An atmospheric journey into the heart of modern England, filmmaker Louis Price weaves together scenes of everyday life within the Black Country in the West Midlands. An area once so industrialised the sky appeared black during the day, and red during the night, today the Black Country is a place of ghosts, existing in the aftermath of its industrial past. Black Country - A Film From England takes place entirely in one day, observing crematoriums, night clubs, UKIP pubs, living rooms and Council Chambers with a hallucinatory eye that presents no easy answers, or neat narrative resolves.
Mixing a combination of industrial archive footage, experimental sound design (wax cylinder recordings, player piano, distorted 78 RPM records), with stripped back austere camera compositions and mysterious, mundane and sometimes unsettling subjects, Black Country is a distorted postcard from a confused and increasingly indecipherable England.

Synopsis

As a sci-fi obsessed woman living in near isolation, Beverly Glenn-Copeland wrote and self-released Keyboard Fantasies in Huntsville, Ontario back in 1986. Recorded in an Atari-powered home-studio, the cassette featured seven tracks of a curious folk-electronica hybrid, a sound realised far before its time.
Three decades on, the musician – now Glenn Copeland – began to receive emails from people across the world, thanking him for the music they’d recently discovered. Courtesy of a rare-record collector in Japan, a reissue of Keyboard Fantasies and subsequent plays by Four Tet, Caribou and more, the music had finally found its audience two generations down the line.
'Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story' tells the time-travelling tale of this mystical musician and vocalist, as the present finally catches up with him and he embarks on his first international tour at the age of 74.  
Capturing five decades of relentless musical output and shifting manifestations of gender and sexual identity, set against a backdrop of profound social change, the film celebrates the unpredictable rhythms of life.
A lullaby to soothe those souls struggling to find their place in the world.

Synopsis

Keifer Nyron Taylor captures the last days of grandfather, Lloydie Plummer, exploring his violent upbringing in Jamaica and the damage done to the family he built in the UK.

Synopsis

People Meeting in a Room reflects on collective film making and workers’ activism, connecting the histories of activists and film makers associated with the Birmingham Trade Union Resource Centre in the 1980s with a group of contemporary collaborators who interpret archival films and collective actions through animation, performance and conversation.