In 19th-century France, Jean Valjean, who for decades has been hunted by the ruthless policeman Javert after he breaks parole, agrees to care for factory worker Fantine's daughter, Cosette. The fateful decision changes their lives forever.
The Selfish Giant is a contemporary fable about 14-year-old Arbor (Conner Chapman) and his best friend Swifty (Shaun Thomas). Excluded from school, and outsiders in their own community, the boys meet Kitten (Sean Gilder), a local scrapman, and begin collecting scrap metal for him using a horse and cart. Swifty has a natural gift with horses and Arbor has a business brain and a way with words – they make a good team. But when Arbor begins to emulate Kitten by becoming greedy and exploitative, tensions build, leading to a tragic event which transforms them all irrevocably.
Dr Ravi Kapoor has reached the end of his tether. He is over-worked and exhausted; his South London hospital is out of funds; and reporters are hounding him about a pensioner, who for three days lay on a trolley in A and E, untended, the blood stiffening on her clothes. Even home life has become impossible, as his father-in-law, a disgusting and difficult old man, has been kicked out of his nursing home and has moved into Ravi's spare bedroom. But then that 'tip top man', his cousin, Sonny, has his brainwave, his 'great eureka'.
Skunk is 11, diabetic, and pretty cool. The summer holidays have just begun and her days are full of easy hopes. Then Mr. Oswald, the ugly man who lives opposite, beats up Rick, the sweet, but unstable boy next door and Skunk’s innocence begins to be drained away at a speed and in a way she cannot control. Her home, her neighbourhood, her school - all become treacherous environments where the happy certainties of childhood give way to a fear-filled doubt, and a complex, broken world fills her future. Skunk seeks solace in the last remaining place where she knows she can find it - the unspoken friendship with sweet, damaged Rick - and falls into a chaos where suddenly, joyfully, she has choice thrust back into her hands. The choice to remain in this place she was never promised, or to leave it entirely - to live or to die.
Broken is a powerful, captivating and heartbreaking exploration of love in all its many forms: idealized, unrequited, unwanted, and - ultimately - unconditional.
“Born in the hour of India’s freedom. Handcuffed to history.” Midnight’s Children is an epic film from Academy Award-nominated director Deepa Mehta, based on the Booker Prize-winning novel by Salman Rushdie.
At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, as India proclaims independence from Great Britain, two newborn babies are switched by a nurse in a Bombay hospital. Saleem Sinai, the illegitimate son of a poor Hindu woman, and Shiva, the offspring of wealthy Muslims, are fated to live the destiny meant for each other. Their lives become mysteriously intertwined and are inextricably linked to India’s whirlwind journey of triumphs and disasters.
Grandmother is a Crab borrows from an earlier digital video, made fifteen years ago, that itself used footage captured from a travel advertisement on television. Black and white, and mirror effects, take the image out of time, giving it both vividness and distance. The music is played in reverse. And the voice-over and under-titles are a poem that re-enters the magic world of a child on a beach.
Happy Returns
I bought a scrapbook collection of one woman’s Birthday cards from a house clearance shop a few years ago. She had only kept the cards from her children and grandchildren. It cost me £ 1.99.
The cards chronicle her life through changing design/slogans and written messages. I’ve bought things like this before and they just fill up my shelves.
A poetry film festival kick-started me into making a film using the scrapbook. I looked for a poem to base the cards around but couldn’t find anything suitable, so I tried to write my own.
A classic rites of passage story of two brothers and the exuberance and pain of their teenage love for the same girl, the pressures of their feudal family life, the horrors and folly of war and the ultimate price of courage and cowardice.
