Projects in genres: Experimental

Synopsis

Riva is the portrait of a woman, Riva Ben Eliezer, now ninety years old. How do you look at the life of someone who has lived through so much? I would look at her hands, wrinkled and old, and think, these are the hands that did all those things, that were communist in Palestine, that were imprisoned and tortured, that bore children and a great and terrible war, that lived in Siberia, that taught kindergarten, that wrote books. These hands, no other, did this, and this is what they look like now. This is what time and life has done to my grandmother's hands.
 
But the film is more than that. It is more than a portrait of a woman who lived through extraordinary times, who was a Jew in a place and time when there was nothing and nowhere worse to be. It is the portrait of a whole life, not just the sections that have the most drama. It is the portrait of her now - for now contains all her past, somehow, in her hands and in her face. In her voice and especially in her laugh.
 
It is a private film made for the public. The use of hand processed images, with their patina of blotches and scratches, creats a space for Riva to exist, where the presentation of her ninety-year-old body is not intrusive but respectful. It is a private film also because it was made in private, just me and her, so our relationship becomes a part of it.
 
It is not my intention with this film to deify Riva. Just to show her, as I see her, because it is important to see the lives of others, lives that have been deeply lived, as Riva's has.

Synopsis

Shadows is a short experimental film about the fact that no matter where we come from or who we are or what language we speak, we are the same colour ie black. The languages spoken in the film are Chinese, Russian, Indian, African and English. The film was created by filming the shadows of people talking against a wall.

Synopsis

In the ex-colliery villages of East Durham, there is an abyss: falling down it is an easy thing. In a dangerous landscape, Barry, 40-year-old ex-youth worker, occasional labourer, wryly comic storyteller and single father, watches out for his 12-year-old son Callum. His eye is drawn to Emma, a 22-year-old with two children, Jade, 7 and Shannon, 4.  Barry likes to help, likes kids and likes Emma. But Emma has her own worries.
 
The film follows her personal journey as she single-mindedly tries to get her partner Darren off heroin: as she acquires the cocktail of drugs that will see him through his 'rattle' and takes him to 'The Breakies', a bleakly isolated collection of fishing huts, out beyond the steelworks, at the mouth of the Tees. And it follows Barry, Jade, Shannon and Callum in tow, picking up the pieces in a community that has moved further and further away from the economic mainstream. The abyss yawns and Barry negotiates the difficult terrain opening up from his own serious misjudgements. Watched by the disapproving Callum, his attempts to help Emma draw him ever closer to the edge.

Synopsis

One soundtrack runs simultaneously to three visual narratives, as snatched moments bring back memories of a younger self. A film about time and growing up.

Synopsis

The Commuter is a Surrealist film in which an office worker shaves his face off every morning in order to blend in with all the other faceless commuters on their way to work. A live-action/digital hybrid, it was repainted on computer frame by frame.
 

Synopsis

Diagrams of chemistry apparatus and educational film footage react and combine in this quirky interpretation of a poem by Nobel Laureate chemist Roald Hoffmann. The film is an experiment to illustrate how technology changes the way we represent the world with results that prove ironic and inconclusive.

Synopsis

The Slits travelled and toured widely as a group. Accompanying them during 1980 and 1981, Christine Robertson filmed intermittently on Super-8, collected whilst managing The Slits. Typical Girls was completed after the group split up in 1982. Filmed on stage in Berlin and Italy and off stage in the Mojave Desert and Death Valley, the film gives an experimental flavour of the unconventional lifestyle the group lived and the unique music that came out of it.

Synopsis

Marilyn, an extravagant dancer whose life is populated by mechanical toys that move spontaneously in her flat, meets men who hardly manage to deal with her unusual, dynamic personality and constantly disappoint her expectations.
 
A change in Marilyn's life occurs when a woman breaks into her private world.

Synopsis

Worst Case Scenario starts out as a series of still photography depicting daily life on a Viennese street corner. But as Sigmund Freud casts his long shadow across the city, the static world slowly and subtly comes to life and an increasingly improbable chain of events and relationships starts to emerge.

Synopsis

Yes is the story of a passionate love affair between an American woman (Joan Allen) and a Middle-Eastern man (Simon Abkarian) in which they confront some of the greatest conflicts of our generation - religious, political and sexual. Sam Neill plays the betrayed and betraying politician husband and Shirley Henderson a philosophical cleaner who witnesses the trail of dirt and heartbreak the lovers leave behind them, as they embark on a journey that takes them from London and Belfast to Beirut and Havana.
 

 

Synopsis

You are a monkey. That's why you pick your nose, that's why you eat fruit and that's why you have those funny dreams about falling out of things.

Synopsis

Immaterial Terrain is made along a stretch of the UK coast around Sizewell nuclear power station. Camera in hand, Richardson walked this coastline. These walks – pilgrimages and acts of protest – structure a film that documents a singular and fragile landscape at an uncertain moment.
Official selection Slow Film Festival, London - World premiere