Projects in categories: Artist Project and Video / Experimental

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.

Synopsis

Through a dynamic fusion of movement and dialogue, THE CONVERSATION explores the challenges black men and women experience when communicating their racial experience to white partners.

Synopsis

Made in and around Thrapston, a market town in Northamptonshire, The Great Bear explores narratives of labour and landscape in the English Midlands. Intensified by its focus on the young, activities and subjectivities of work entwine with patterns of seasonal change, the landscape both source and product of working life.

Synopsis

A dreamlike montage of a woodland, a dog and a search in twilight. The Search evokes the intensity of searching for a cadaver, where a dog trained to seek out the scent of decomposition takes us on a hunt around a wild landscape.

Synopsis

Inspired by the shapes and sounds of Kingston upon Hull, an audio-visual project that explores the city over the course of a day, focusing on the quiet drama in the scenes that are everywhere yet overlooked: the familiar seen from an unfamiliar perspective.

Synopsis

A note on over-development, Simon Liu’s vision of Hong Kong carries both the marvels of modern life and its short circuits. A chaos broken only by the soft touches of natural light and flowing water captured on 16mm, one feels the tension of a city on the brink of combustion.
Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 2020 - Bright Future - International premiere

Synopsis

A personal essay film centred on copla - a form of Spanish lyrical song which powerfully communicates emotions of sorrow and the profound sadness of woman.
The film combines filmmaker Nina Danino's interest in the female voice with archive and newly filmed performances. The film sets out to look for copla and the women and singers of copla and on her own memory and experience of it.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Experimenta Strand - World premiere

Synopsis

A Line Was Drawn weaves together material from a number of different sources including animated sequences, television and film archives with two distinct voiceover narrations. The work explores issues of how our world is structured through the creation of borders and boundaries limiting movement, thinking, questioning and agency.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Experimenta Strand - World premiere

Synopsis

QUEERING DI TEKNOLOJIK is a message from the future. Spoken by the collective digital voice of a group of queer artists and activists, this collaborative project speculates about the possibilities of a temporality yet to come. This is a message of hope.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Official Short Film Competition - Experimenta Strand - World premiere