Projects in categories: Artist Project and Video / Experimental and with status: Post-production

Synopsis

Aryan Pandey, a Nepalese Migrant Worker living in Peckham South London, experiences an existential crisis as he tries to make his way in the world of work. Aryan finds it hard to cope with the stresses of everyday life. Absurd visions of a disturbing nature plagues Aryan’s mind and place fear in his heart. Aryan’s inability to confide his fears to girlfriend Sarah places a strain on their relationship. Aryan’s inner voice encourages him to exercise the power of concentration to build the mental strength and resilience to free his mind from mental decay. Through deep meditation and exercise, Aryan gains the willpower, strength and self-belief to face his demons in the heat of the night. Aryan’s voyage of self-discovery illustrates the power of the human will to overcome adversity during times of crisis.

Synopsis

Two hands, Glynid and Hynus, are trapped together indoors. As they talk, we learn that they are waiting for a virus wreaking havoc in the outer world. Glynid is an anxiety-riddled know–it–all who dogmatically follows ‘the science,’ while Hynus is an ignoramus whose nonsensical belligerence highlights their absurd situation. They argue over what precautions to take, what the statistics mean, and how to pass the time. Endless desperate moves ensue as the pair attend a virtual Shibari workshop, create pubic hair art, compose a virus-themed anthem, and partake in cleansings and poisonings, before remembering they have a child that they may have accidentally left outside. Deciding to leave to find the child, they stay. This puppet show, drawing from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, satirizes the Covid-19 era. Connected to the outside by a window that doubles as a screen, what begins as a waiting game soon unravels into paranoiac exchanges, conspiratorial musings, and bouts of reflection that lead to self–loathing in one hand and self–care in the other. As the objects that once held meaning to them disappear while they wait, a new reality grows around them, if only they had eyes to see it.

Synopsis

Famed adventurer, Lord Argh, is sent on a quest to find the legendary Golden Dragon Skull by mushroom obsessed King Kevin, ruler of Mushroomia. Travelling with his faithful squire Sally, the beautiful Amazonia, and the vile Slimeball The Were-Snail the unlikely questers must work together to overcome many adventures, trials, and tribulations. Will they all return with the skull and save the kingdom of Mushroomia?

Synopsis

Locomotion/Murmuration is an experimental documentary set within the train systems of Tokyo An observational portrait exploring connections between the trains and their passengers, we drift back and forth along the rail lines, but always returning to the human and mechanical processes that form a living organ within a vibrant metropolis.

Synopsis

LITTLE BOXES was shot entirely on Zoom during the height of the Covid lockdown. Whilst deep into pre-production to shoot another improv-based film in the traditional, location-based sense, the pandemic struck our plans a fatal blow. Having no other option, we decided not to concede defeat and made the decision to create the best, most realistic project we could with what we had at our disposal, under the most difficult of circumstances. LITTLE BOXES is a drama about how governmental decisions during the pandemic affect the lives of ordinary people in a small corner of Northern England. This hyper-realistic, performance based film takes you on a journey through the world of video calling, observing the strain on relationships through these tiny Zoom windows - their own "little boxes" - and the pressures of enforced incarceration. Isolated by the virus, the whole world has had to find new ways to communicate and hold our loved ones close - these issues are universally relatable. The pain of separation. Together, yet apart. LITTLE BOXES proves that necessity is the mother of invention and that art will always find a way. The actor’s own lived experience of lockdown seeps through into their characters, alongside the mental pressures we were all buckling under. This enforced style of shooting created a safe place for the characters to communicate in a way that might not have been possible in a conventional filming environment.

Synopsis

A deep and rich exploration of the complex ancestries of African diasporic cultural expression, inspired by post-colonial African spirituality and artistic practices from West Africa to the Caribbean and Europe. It mixes subtle and exquisite film with live choreography to create a visual poem of dynamic interactions between image, dance, ritual and music.

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.

Synopsis

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

Synopsis

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 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

BRIGHT PHOENIX is a prism of a drama within a documentary that explores the uncomfortable shifts in psychogeography as Liverpool is ripped down and rebuilt. The centrepiece is a performance film of Jeff Young's live play, set within the prism of a documentary lament of Lime Street, the gateway to the city; a row of gin palaces and picture palaces, a rallying point for the sundry of Liverpool, once a peoples’ playground, then left to rot before demolition and a sterile desecration of the past in the form of ‘regeneration’. Ghosts, childhood innocence, the glory of film in the imagination, neglected but etched in pictures, splendid forever.