Beginning in Vienna where the filmmaker meets her father, David, whom she hasn’t seen since she was two. Through a mixture of onscreen text, sit down interviews and archival footage, David’s early life as a teenage activist in Northern Ireland is revealed. The film then travels to Belfast and segues into an impossible reconstruction of David’s early years. In and attempt to better know him, Garnett uses previously recorded audio interviews to skillfully craft a lip-synced, cross-gender performance where she impersonates the his youthful presence and casts a transgender actress in the role of his girlfriend. The film cycles through various camera modes – narrative vignettes on RED alongside handheld camcorder footage of contemporary Belfast street life mixed with these verbatim re-enactments – to create a fragmented account of a teenager struggling to find an identity in a rapidly deteriorating society, and the parallel struggle of a filmmaker to connect with her estranged father. The layers of texture in this film mirror the fractured lens of history, and point to the impossibility of filmmaking as a container for 'Truth'. In TROUBLE, cinema is a means of rebuilding family ties of highlighting the complexities of representation and the construction of identity.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Experimenta Strand - World premiere
The Withnail generation had children... and Owen is one of them. His memories of his wild childhood weave a spell on him – or was it the acid he accidentally took as a child? Weaving her spell too is his mother, the free-spirited Marianne. She is supposed to be on her deathbed – but she's not going quietly. The family gather at their crumbling farmhouse for her last birthday. Among the stones and the animals, they prepare for battle. Owen struggles to free himself from Marianne's web and win back his ex-partner Caroline. Along the way he must reckon with uncles, babies, brothers, sisters, children and dads. Love, pain, laughter, wine – and mushrooms. Everyone in this family longs to be free. Their quests play out like a game of hide and seek in the old house – a curiously timeless space full of secrets rich and strange.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Journey Strand - World premiere
Exploring how punk influenced politics in late-1970s Britain, when a group of artists united to take on the National Front, armed only with a fanzine and a love of music. Developed from Rubika Shah's short film WHITE RIOT: LONDON (Sundance 2017, Berlin 2017).
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Documentary Competition - World premiere
Winner Grierson Award for Best Documentary, BFI London Film Festival 2019
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2020 - Generation 14plus - International premiere
A meditation on landscape, and a celebration of the words of Scots poet and writer Nan Shepherd (1893–1981).
The film brings together elements of choreography (by Simone Kenyon), fragments of Shepherd's text and a polyvocal score by Hanna Tuulikki.
A young black man from a working-class background is on a trajectory towards success when an encounter with the police jeopardises everything.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Journey Strand
An intergenerational film that traverses the relationship between my grandmother (Raji) and my mother (Aruna), during challenging times. As Raji struggles to fight her hallucinatory demons, Aruna attempts to embrace her world.
THE WHOLE TRUTH tells an honest yet hopeful story of the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse, honouring the strength of survivors and championing friendship and communication as healing tools.
Mallory is a smart, well-intentioned but lonely young police officer who must interview Jenny, a schoolgirl, about the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her teacher. During their ABE interview, as she struggles to get Jenny to confront her trauma and admit the truth of what has happened to her, an unlikely bond forms between the two women. As tensions rise, Mallory is forced to face the truth about her own past and realise that the best way for her to truly help Jenny is to finally find the strength to share it. With each others support, Mallory and Jenny must face the abuse they have suffered and find the strength to talk about it.
THE WHOLE TRUTH confronts the stigma around childhood sexual abuse head on and explores the impact of child abuse in adulthood, the importance of speaking up and the future that is possible for survivors when they begin to heal. The film aims to empower survivors, dissolve the taboo around these issues and spark discussions among audiences around the importance of support systems for survivors navigating an often traumatising legal system alongside the psychological aftermath of abuse.
THE WHOLE TRUTH is endorsed by the charity One in Four www.oneinfour.org.uk
CAT IN THE WALL tells the true story of how a cat, stuck in a wall, changes the lives of aspirational migrants, benefit fraudsters and gentrified Brexiteers.
Life on a council estate in Brexit London - gentrification plans bring astronomic bill for homeowners and aggravate the community. In the eye of the storm Irina, a Bulgarian single mother, tries to breakthrough as an architect and refuses to live on benefits like most of her neighbours.
She galvanizes the homeowners to appeal against bill with the Council but the English assure her that any attempt to fight the system is doomed. Irina’s family and people living on benefits clash over the ownership of a cat. different side of British society is revealed to her and she realises she is trapped in the walls of her property and metaphorically in her mind.
She takes a drastic decision to change her life.
Official Selection Locarno Film Festival 2019 - International Competition - World premiere
Isabelle, a geneticist recovering from a toxic marriage and is raising her only daughter Zoe in conjunction with her ex-husband. Zoe means everything to her mother, but when tragedy strikes the fractured family, Isabelle takes matters into her own hands.
Official Selection Toronto International Film Festival 2019 - World premiere
Official Selection Tribeca Film Festival 2020
Johanna Morrigan is 16, smart, opinionated, brash, over-weight - not exactly the high school prom queen. She is also a virgin whose hormones are rioting like a zoo on fire. Although she loves her dysfunctional family, Johanna is desperate to get out and make a name for herself. And so she does, as Dolly Wilde, a bad-ass music critic at a hip magazine. In person, she rubs shoulders (and sometimes more...) with rock stars, while on paper, she tears them apart. As she slaughters her way to greater and greater success, the lines between Johanna Morrigan and Dolly Wilde begin to haze. Can she be an ‘enfant terrible’ and hold on to her family, her heroes and her heart? Johanna definitely figured out how to build a girl, but has she figured out which girl to build?
Official Selection Toronto International Film Festival 2019 - Special Presentations - World premiere
