Projects in categories: Documentary and with status: Post-production

Synopsis

LIME STREET combines archive footage, documentary, animation and the performance film of COSTA Book Award nominated Jeff Young's play BRIGHT PHOENIX starring Cathy Tyson (Mona Lisa). It explores how changing, sanitising and eradicating the urban landscape distinct to a city, notably the now demolished Futurist Cinema in Liverpool that is featured in BRIGHT PHOENIX, leads to a degradation of culture and a caustic erosion with the past. How do places recall culture and society in a unique way? How do they offer a physical, organic link to new generations? How are they live stages for culture to grow? This is a city that can’t be found in a guidebook, a culture that lives in the walls of places like the Futurist Cinema. When it is torn down, the future vanishes. LIME STREET blends an elegiac play with an investigative documentary, ergo the recent arrest of city Mayor Joe Anderson and current investigation into bribery charges surrounding property development. In an age where city planning and regeneration are so relevant to the present and future of cities, this project explores how retaining and restoring places means so much more than nostalgia.

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Documentary featuring nomadic couple Jane and Etienne, walking through the dolomites with their three donkeys and two dogs.

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A shocking expose of Western governments' love affair with torture. In the 1950s Montreal Scottish born psychiatrist Dr Ewen Cameron experimented on his unwitting patients. His techniques included sensory deprivation, forced comas and LSD injections, covertly funded by the Canadian Government and the CIA. Since then his techniques have been used in Northern Ireland, Guantánamo and 27 other countries. 'Do No Harm' includes extraordinary first hand testimony from Guantanamo Bay survivors, Hooded Men from Northern Ireland, senior American psychologists and military personnel. This documentary shows how the collusion of doctors to aid and abet torture began in the 1950s and continues to this day. Interviewees include: former Chief Investigator for al Qaeda Mark Fallon; US Army General Stephen Xenakis; Guantanemo detainees Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Moazzam Begg; and Dr. Steven Reisner who blew the whistle on the collusion between psychologists and the CIA. In Belfast we film with Hooded Men Francis McGuigan, Liam Shannon and Brian Turley, as the European Court of Human Rights decides whether to rule in their favour and redraw the boundaries on what is legally defined as torture.

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A look into the world of one of the most successful video game franchises, Grand Theft Auto - a video game series created by David Jones for Scotland-based games developer company DMA Design, which became Rockstar North. The franchise has sold more than 250 million units worldwide.

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Through her archive diary filmmaker Nichola Bruce takes us on a journey into the life of Lancashire artist and vicar's daughter Liz Finch. From her life changing accident and rural solitude, to the mad social whirl of 80s London anarchic performances and now the present day- an intriguing glimpse into a recluse's private world.

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, a distorted postcard from a confused and increasingly indecipherable England.

Synopsis

An English photographer looks back at his latest assignment: a reportage on Father Renato Chiera an Italian missionary working with children in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Mixing documentary and narrative DEAR CHILD tells the stories of teenagers caught up in drug trafficking, and their attempt to change their lives. It is a poetic film about the fight of a community against violence, poverty and despair. It is a film about love.

Synopsis

The KLF (the “Kopyright Liberation Front”) was one of the biggest British music acts of the 90s, and for a period, the biggest selling singles act in the world. Bizarrely, they achieved global success from a damp squat in south London, and ultimately burnt most of their profits (1 million quid) in a legendary act of nihilism on a remote Scottish island. The explosive artistic partnership of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty is utterly unique in the history of music and art and continues to inspire artists and audiences the world over. But due to their secrecy and distaste for the press, the story of the KLF’s meteoric rise, epic self-destruction and dark exile, has never been told in their own words. Until now.

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A heart-warming story about two marathon runners in Sierra Leone: Idrissa Kargbo and the country’s champion runner Mamie Konneh-Lahun. Their only sponsor is Jo Dunlop, an Australian aid worker with a big personality, and a passion for supporting the Sierra Leone’s young athletic talent. Jo’s dream is to get Idrissa and Mamie to as many high profile national and international competitions as she can. Though tragically, during the course of the film, Mamie defects after coming 20th in the London Marathon, leaving Jo and Idrissa heartbroken. Over 18 months of races, Jo and Idrissa formed a unique and touching friendship with the shared dream of bringing a story of positivity and hope to a country still struggling to recover from the devastating effects of the civil war. But their journey has been far from smooth; from near-hypothermia to malaria, death-threats and corruption, and an Ebola outbreak which affects them all, Idrissa and Jo have had to ght to keep their dream alive. And of course united in their hope for Mamie’s return. Through these stories, the film offers an intimate glimpse into life in Sierra Leone, which vibrantly features as a character in its own right.

Synopsis

An expansive journey through the Kazakh steppe, this film piece seeks to excavate layers of myth, history and geology to reveal the shifting fault lines between a government, its people and their land. The film brings into focus Kazakhstan’s search for a post-Soviet identity and a state-sponsored programme of cultural production that on the one hand connects back to the ancient folklore and belief systems of the Silk Road, while on the other, seeks to embrace the values of Western capitalism. Adopting an experimental documentary form, On A Clear Day provides a meditative faux observational film about the continual process of construction involved in nationhood and national identity. Shot on 16mm, the camera is drawn across the terrain of Eastern Kazakhstan through a series of encounters that offer a translation of a reality within the challenging social and political context of Kazakhstan. The Kazakh steppe creates a rhythm for the film as the vast terrain forms the conditions for each encounter with locations including the Bogatyr open quarry, Semipalatinsk nuclear test site, Ekibastuz generating station and the newly constructed city of Nur-Sultan. De-literalised through the use of constructed as well as un-orchestrated scenes; the film attempts to apprehend truths. Its facts, however, are always based on fictions - the ancient myths and folklore of Kazakhstan itself.

Synopsis

When the Calais Jungle was ignored and condemned by authorities, ordinary people stepped in to support the refugees. This is the untold story of the volunteers and those they tried to help. ON OUR DOORSTEP delves deep into an aspect of the refugee crisis that rarely reached the press. With NGOs being blocked by red tape and the absence of any positive action by French or British authorities, the film is a behind-the-scenes look at the unprecedented grassroots movement that rose to aid the refugees in Calais, and the community that sprang up there, before it was forcefully demolished. This is the story of what happens when young and inexperienced citizens are forced to devise systems and structures to support 10,000 refugees; and are left unguided to face the moral and emotional conflicts, blurred lines and frequent grey areas of giving aid to vulnerable people. People who do not want to be there. Originally arriving at the Calais Jungle as a volunteer, Thomas Laurance ended up documenting what he saw over the year he spent there, until the camp’s destruction in October 2016. This film is the result of the remarkable and intimate access he gained to both volunteers and refugees.

Synopsis

Every year cowboys travel from all over the American West to share their poetry at cowboy poetry gatherings.