When the water company and local authorities fail the community, the wild swimmers of Bristol fight back through activism, swimming like a mermaid and getting married.
Do humans have the right to nature? In this tender film, director Charlotte Sawyer tells a story of a community of wild swimmers in Bristol (UK) affected by raw sewage pollution of the river Avon. England is one of the only two countries in the world to have a fully privatised water and sewage disposal system, and with only 14% of English rivers in good ecological health, the mission to keep the rivers clean is not going well.
In a series of moving, exciting and thought-provoking scenes, the swimmers create a stunning, light-hearted yet fascinating tapestry, probing how activism starts from the grassroots, and carries a profound universal lesson for all of us. There’s a wedding, drum’n’bass, an inflatable turd, and a whole lot of cheesecake in this poignant reflection on people’s innovative battles for the natural world they cherish.
This emotionally charged journey, filmed over seven years, follows the extraordinary story of Rudrani Chettri and her friends from baby blessings, red light districts and dazzling Hindu festivals to the glamorous world of photoshoots, designers, hair and make-up, lights and electrifying action. We discover the transgender trans - Hijra community of Delhi as they set about creating India’s first ever trans modelling agency and an extravagant, paradigm-shifting, catwalk event.
Far from a bleak story of suffering and discrimination, this film explores the world of India’s ‘third gender’ (Hijra) in a positive way, full of laughter, drama, excitement, and pathos. We discover a complex world where traditional Hindu values clash with modern human rights. We immerse ourselves in unfamiliar places but find identifiable stories of love and loss, hope and poverty, beauty, glamour, and catwalk glory.
Official selection BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival 2024 - UK premiere
Epic forests of the Siberian Taiga and black lava landscapes of a Hawaiian volcano are woven through this quietly powerful film that opens outwards from a personal story about living with uncertainty.
Rebecca E Marshall draws from footage she has shot over twenty years in an intimate address to her child in the future. She builds connections between Agafya Lykova, an elderly woman surviving alone in the Siberian forest who scares bears away by banging space-rocket debris, a crew simulating life isolated on Mars and her young child discovering the world minute by minute. This endlessly surprising journey offers up images that shake ideas of past, present and future to form a deeply tender vision of the timeless human connections that continue to weave through an increasingly divided world.
Xylouris White (drummer Jim White, Dirty Three; lutist Giorgos Xylouris and Guy Picciotto, Fugazi) provide a haunting original score.
Official Selection Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival 2024 - World premiere
Against the backdrop of the Women, Life, Freedom protest movement in Iran, filmmaker Elahe Esmaili is helping her parents to pack up the family home. As the boxes stack up, discussions flare between the generations: Elahe does not wear the hijab, embodying the courage of her generation’s struggles. But can changing a society be as simple as moving house?
Official Selection Visions du Réel 2024 - World premiere
Official Selection Sheffield DocFest 2024
Official Selection Telluride Film Festival 2024
Official Selection Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival 2025
Hassan is a young airport customs officer who must secure an advance on his salary for his mother’s medication. As the dark side of his job becomes more clear, Hassan must decide what matters to him the most, and what cost he is willing to pay, navigating a totalitarian system.
Official Selection Black Star Film Festival BSFF 2024
UK Airport Immigration Officer Sarah begins to question her role and institution when an unidentified passenger (whom Sarah believes to be an illegal immigrant) dies on an arrival flight from Egypt.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2024
As the world shuts down due to COVID, Orla (‘Socks’) decides to leave Belfast and travel across the Irish Sea for access to a safe abortion. ‘Travel Socks’ follows this spirited young woman on her journey, as she overcomes numerous and sometimes farcical obstacles in her path - whilst attempting to keep the truth from her overbearing yet loving family.
Striving to build a successful life in London, Reza places an ad in a peculiar newspaper and discovers the Iranian community hidden in plain sight.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2024
A quest to find the truth behind a thirty year old memory, along the way connecting the dots between family, community, the power of place and the concept of home.
Filmed over a period of 10 years, this is the story of how a group of courageous fishermen in India’s Gulf of Kutch join forces with an NGO in Washington, DC to take on one of the world’s most powerful institutions, the World Bank Group.
For years, the fishermen of the Gulf of Kutch in Gujarat and their social movement MASS have been battling coal-fired power plants that threaten their livelihoods and traditional way of life by polluting the water and the countryside. Then, in 2015, their fight took an international dimension when US lawyers at EarthRights International took on their case to file the first-ever lawsuit against the World Bank’s private lending arm, the International Finance Corporation. One of the most destructive power plants in the Gulf of Kutch is owned by Indian multinational Tata, who received funding from the IFC. The IFC claims absolute legal immunity but the fisherman challenge this in ever higher courts. In 2018 the case makes its way to the US Supreme Court. Will the fishermen be able to change international law to hold the IFC to account – and save their livelihoods?
Official Selection Big Sky Documentary Film Festival 2024 - World premiere
For Henry, the community garden is his escape from the daily toil in the city. However, the day has come for it to be demolished. Henry and his community can't agree on how to save it.
Official Selection Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival 2025
Young journalist Shiori Ito embarks on a courageous investigation of her own sexual assault in an improbable attempt to prosecute her high-profile offender. Her quest becomes a landmark case in Japan, exposing the country’s outdated judicial and societal systems.
Official selection Sundance Film Festival 2024 World Cinema Documentary Competition - World premiere
Official Selection CPH:DOX 2024 - European premiere
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2024
