BLACK BAUHINIA () is the first feature-length documentary film on Hong Kong localism and the independence movement, which fundamentally transformed Hong Kong’s domestic and international relations.
The debut film by director and co-producer Dr Malte Kaeding offers a balanced and critical assessment of a subject so complex and sensitive that local filmmakers have shied away from it. Based on Malte’s decade-long research on localism, he follows two young localist leaders’ emotional journey from electoral successes into prison and exile. The collaborative style of filmmaking allows for intimate reflections on the costs of resistance, self-sacrifices, and the meaning of home.
Throughout the film’s three-year production period, localism inspired the 2019 Hong Kong protests, while the ensuing government crackdown rendered the documentary into an outlawed element of resistance. BLACK BAUHINIA captures the ideas of a young generation that dared to challenge an authoritarian China.
This hypnotic VR narrative unfolds around 5 characters, increasingly struggling to access their uploaded memories. Set in a breathtaking visual landscape, this dystopian future unravels slowly around you, leaving you challenged to re-think your own beliefs and actions. It’s an exploration of a possible future that says much about our present lives.
Imagine a world where there is no air left to breathe, no rivers to race a paper boat on and no parks to roam in. Environmental damage, job-automation, the breakdown of personal connections have led to a future where the best choice of survival is to upload your own memories into an automated AI cloud server and reconnect with loved ones in the vastness of the net.
Official Selection Sundance Film Festival 2021
The anthropologist Ger Duijzings reads his diary from wartime Yugoslavia (1992) while walking the streets of London. His diary entries are echoed and confronted by images of London. The film was shot with seven cameras in real-time and a single continuous take.
The true story of the Mangrove 9, the group of Black activists who clashed with London police during a protest march in 1970 and their highly publicised trial that followed. The trial was the first judicial acknowledgment of behaviour motivated by racial hatred within the UK's Metropolitan Police.
Part of the BBC-commissioned drama anthology 'Small Axe'.
Official Selection Cannes Film Festival 2020
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2020 - Opening Night Gala
David fakes a marriage with his foreigner friend in an attempt to spare him from the new labour laws imposed by the Brexit deal. His life then takes a twist when he falls in love and he needs to face his family, society and his own troubled mind.
Made entirely in Unreal, during lockdown in the UK, in a week in which VE day celebrations collided with Black Lives Matter protests, this film questions the persistence of nostalgia as a form of social control.
Ding Ling, a research scientist who fled Indonesia in the wake of rising sea levels, disembarks from the cargo ship on which she had been living. She moves onwards to explore new/old territories, revealing something of her past in Indonesia and China via Singapore.
The episode DING LING AND SENAIT is a moment in Shezad Dawood's episodic film series 'Leviathan Cycle', shifting the narrative from one of breakdown and fragmentation to a focus on methodologies for surviving the future.
In a forgotten seaside town in the north of England, seventy-eight year old Dave hands out food and kindness to those in need. After ten years of austerity, this nuanced portrait of a volunteer-run food bank penetrates the harsh reality of contemporary Britain.
Two men share their experiences of working in the food industrial complex, challenging our traditional ideas of food production. Dealing with a patriarchal paradigm in crisis, disjointed offers a performative space to heal from trauma: work movements become a way of embodying the inaccessible.
The cruelty of confinement and the struggle for liberation contained within in hand-drawn animation and archival footage.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2020
EVE is an intimate story of a 9 year old girl called Eve, living in one of the oldest off-grid communities in the UK. Follow her journey returning to school and becoming a young climate activist.
