Projects in genres: Experimental and with status: Post-production

Synopsis

A troubled vagabond who helps strangers bring an end to their suffering is forced into a reckoning with his own moral duties as a father. JACKDAW is a dark, experimental drama that explores the emotional complexity bound to the debate on euthanasia.

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 woman in the state of an agony and rebirth. She can only find her strength in her wild nature, in her witch nature, in her return to primal instincts. How the victims of abuse have to redefine themselves and learn the world again. Personal growth and self discovery portrayed by a single mother, her daily struggles, her beliefs, and her close relationship with nature and her child. Film shows absurdity of how terribly we allow ourselves to be asked simply stupid questions. The story is told in three plans: A day to day reality, second plan is a dream and third, return to her childhood.

Synopsis

Miss Khan Ab to Hans Do is a feature-length film that comments on the communistic set-up. It dwells on the vital issue of old-age people being surrendered to death and everything begins with a journalist and her living mannequin.

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

Damascus as a neo art form. A thirst for abstraction at a time when immediacy and simultaneity – culminating in the multiple strand captioning of TV news screens, or the instant feedback of Twitter, tyrannical demands, forcing aesthetic sensibilities to seek new ways of slowing down. As they float through a plastic representation of time-space (blank as Richard Hell) we need a way to associate their blankness to action as it eases us to a pseudo-understanding of a mindless state we only observe. Damascus as an end to mindwash religion, nowhere politics and bogus philosophy. The first film is the visual film. A waltz through the night of city that transcends itself. Three principals enacting the dance to death of relationships, plurality and urban living. The visual element of the project flows through time and arches through experience that answers nobodies' questions. It is disorientating: both musically and formally. Experience is placed front and centre, whether that be disconnection or sexual release. Best invoked by the term Psychogeography/ Which was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."