Projects in genres: Experimental

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

Synopsis

A movie that tells the story of an archetypal human life using images taken from All around the World and The Last 100 Years of Cinema.

The images span the microcosm - inside the body - through the individual - the first cry of a new born baby - to the macrocosm - accumulated archive footage of ritual celebration and the carnage of war.

The editing, music, and the mythic narrative arc of the material is designed to take the viewer on a roller coaster tour of the human body and life cycle. Every possible depiction of the human life from microscopic medical to portraits and newsreels, from births to deaths, are cut to a powerful music track by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead to create a powerful and highly emotional film, with peaks of ecstasy and troughs of despair.

The power of this film derives from the force of numbers; each face, each person, each body, each glimpse of anatomy, is both abstracted and dignified by being part of a huge flow, a torrent of humanity larger that any of us can conceive.

A Century of Human Drama and Struggle captured in Moving Images.

The film is supported by a highly innovative website project which can be seen at www.bodysong.com.

Synopsis

De Chirico is an experimental film in which sunlight projects the shadow of passers-by onto a concrete wall, turning them into actors in an accidental cinema. The film is named after the Italian artist who painted city squares in evening light, populated only by shadows.