The Royal Shakespeare Company explores the future of theatre with Magic Leap in this sublime production of the "Seven Ages of Man" speech from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Here they present a mixed reality experience using cutting-edge volumetric capture with Shakespearean actor Robert Gilbert and an original musical score by award-winning composer Jessica Curry. The line “all the world’s a stage” turns literal as users experience the play in multiple and simultaneous places.
Official Selection Sundance Film Festival 2019 - New Frontiers Exhibitions - World premiere
A playwright risks his life in returning to his home city to find out if a woman with whom he once had a passionate and illicit affair ever truly loved him, only to learn that it was only ever the unknowing and distance that kept their desire alive.
Set in Venice in 1885, Morton Vint, an ambiguous young writer fascinated by iconic romantic poet Jeffrey Aspern (now deceased), strives to get his hands on the letters Aspern wrote to his beautiful mistress, Juliana Bordereau. Now, decades later, Juliana lives in a Venetian palazzo with her niece, whom she dominates and Morton will come to seduce. But do these letters really exist and what scandalous information about Juliana and Aspern will they bring to the surface?
Based on the Henry James novella 'The Aspern Papers'.
Dr Faraday, the son of a housemaid, has built a life of quiet respectability as a country doctor. During the long hot summer of 1948, he is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall, Warwickshire where his mother once worked. The Hall has been home to the Ayres family for more than two centuries. But it is now in decline and its inhabitants - mother, son and daughter - are haunted by something more ominous than a dying way of life. When he takes on his new patient, Faraday has no idea how closely, and how disturbingly, the family’s story is about to become entwined with his own.
Based on Colin Wilson's novel ‘Adrift in Soho’, published in 1961, following the book’s critique of society through the bohemian Soho of the 1950s with its trappings between the daytime poverty and the libertarian nightlife, and portraying a group of young people who meet in Soho.
Starting as a fictional drama about a documentary, the film ends up as a documentary of a fictional drama through the lens of a group of young filmmakers. It can be seen as an homage to the Free Cinema filmmakers of the 1950s, a movement that Colin Wilson lived through and very much identified with.
In this adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy, both the staging and the interpretation of this classic play are radically reinvigorated for a contemporary audience. In a godless world of moral relativism, we follow Macbeth’s inner journey from his position as an assured warrior hero, to his nadir as a bereft, lonely, insecure and guilt-ridden king. Driven by his ambition, which he attempts to justify by a desperate appeal to supernatural signs and influences, Macbeth finally recognises his personal culpability, casts aside his self-excusing acts of self-deception, and dies bravely and defiantly, bleakly aware of the fragility of his own humanity.
Shakespeare's genius encompasses a deft and fluid ability to weave complex poetic threads that bind together the outer material story, and the inner psychological narrative.
We have created sequences of cinematic poetry to work in sympathetic engagement with the actual poetry at such moments – not just summoning the Shakespearean imagery in newly visualised form but allowing the stream of Shakespearean imagery to suggest other directions of travel for the film’s account of Macbeth’s inner world. Our film language is as dexterous, fluid and imaginative as the spoken language is at such moments.
Ophelia is the Queen of Denmark’s most trusted lady-in-waiting. She soon captures the attention of the handsome Prince Hamlet and a forbidden love blossoms. As war brews, lust and betrayal are tearing Elsinore Castle apart from within and Ophelia must decide between her true love or her own life in order to protect a very dangerous secret.
A reimagining of Shakespeare’s famed tragedy 'Hamlet'.
Official Selection Sundance Film Festival 2018 - Premieres - World premiere
A fictionalised documentary essay, tracing the politics of the Thames River, from colonialism to global financialisation, through the prism of Joseph Conrad’s 'Heart of Darkness'.
Two unseen people meet in Shoeburyness, where the Thames River meets the North Sea. With a visually distinctive use of tableau shots of locations along the Thames, they narrate their journey to London’s Docklands. The woman quotes from 'Heart of Darkness', but instead of travelling up the Congo River into the heart of Africa, their journey ends in the heart of London’s Docklands, where contemporary darkness reigns. A self-proclaimed ‘accelerationist’, the woman plans to destroy the financial district and accelerate capitalism towards its end, while the man is more concerned for the ecology of the river and our debt to nature.
A young woman visits home and just as she's about to ring the bell, the aroma of food evokes a powerful memory which takes her back to her childhood and it also reminds her of her fabricated past.
Official Selection Rotterdam International Film Festival 2018 - World premiere
Frances thinks Brian is having an affair. In her pursuit to save their marriage she will soon find out more than she ever wanted.
A short film based on the stage play CROSS by Deborah Kearne.
Experimental artist and auteur Andrew Kotting creates a groundbreaking crossover between narrative film and contemporary art piece, based on the award-winning play by Hattie Naylor. The film is inspired by the true story of Ivan Mishukov, who walked out of his Moscow apartment at the age of four and spent two years living on the city streets where he was adopted by a pack of wild dogs. In the recession-ravaged city, Ivan’s human world was dominated by deprivation and violence; his only hope was to turn to feral dogs for company, protection and warmth. Kotting’s spellbinding and utterly original story of survival conjures the streets of Moscow in the 1990s through the eyes of a child, drawing on a range of innovative modes and techniques to produce a montage essay on the state of the world.
Official Selection Rotterdam International Film Festival 2018 - International premiere