Projects in genres: Woman Director

Synopsis

Seventeen-year-old Ying Ling is away from home training to become a mortician at one of China’s largest funeral homes. Despite her fear of ghosts and dead bodies, she learns the spa rituals; cleaning and massaging the corpses while the grieving families look on.
Ying Ling finds solace from her macabre role through her playful banter with another of the young morticians. Together, they spend their time off talking about their hopes, fears and plans for the future.
As one of many rural-to-urban teenagers working to support her family, Ying Ling must immerse herself in the surreal and grinding world of China’s industrialisation of mortality. With intimate access and moments of humour, we follow Ying Ling as she learns about life while surrounded by death.
Official Selection Berlinale 2017 - Generation 14plus - World premiere

Synopsis

A study of the transformation of asbestos extraction from the earth to extraction from the walls. In this piece the artists ask how both filming and the use of found footage can be thought of as forms of extraction: extracting images from forms and from contexts.
Mined, extracted, and woven, asbestos was the magic mineral. Towns became cities under its patronage, Persian kings entertained guests with its fireproof nature, and centuries of industry raked in the profits of its global application. We now live in the remains of this toxic dream, a dream that with the invention of electron microscopes revealed our material history as a disaster in waiting. Yet the asbestos industry has far from left us, with extraction from the soil transforming to extraction from our walls. We are now faced with two options: to remove this material from our homes and start anew, or to build upon its residue. Removal is a dangerous and costly operation. So often we choose to live amongst it instead, choking out our walls with plastic tarping: the failed promises of modernism literally entombed all around us.
Shot in the mining township of Asbestos, Quebec, home to the world’s largest asbestos mine, that only stopped extraction in 2012, the film is a meditation on the entanglement of the fragility of bodies, the nonlinearity of progress, and the persistence of matter. (Sasha Litvintseva and Graeme Arnfield)
Official Selection Berlinale 2017 - Forum Expanded

Synopsis

Viceroy’s House in Delhi was the home of the British rulers of India. After 300 years, that rule was coming to an end. For 6 months in 1947, Lord Mountbatten, great grandson of Queen Victoria, assumed the post of the last Viceroy, charged with handing India back to its people.
The film’s story unfolds within that great House. Upstairs lived Mountbatten together with his wife and daughter; downstairs lived their 500 Hindu, Muslim and Sikh servants. As the political elite; Nehru, Jinnah and Gandhi, converged on the House to wrangle over the birth of independent India, conflict erupted. A decision was taken to divide the country and create a new Muslim homeland: Pakistan. It was a decision whose consequences reverberate to this day.
The film examines these events through the prism of a marriage - that of Dickie and Edwina Mountbatten, and a romance, that between a young Hindu servant, Jeet, and his intended Muslim bride, Aalia. The young lovers find themselves caught up in the seismic end of Empire, in conflict with the Mountbattens and with their own communities, but never ever giving up hope.
Official Selection Berlinale 2017 - Out of Competition - World premiere

Synopsis

Atom Spirit explores the increased interconnectedness of advanced technology and nature within the age of the Anthropocene. The film is set in Trinidad and Tobago, in a location that serves as a nexus point where desire, ecology and queerness intersect.

Atom Spirit is a film that reconceptualises our relationships with the environment, non-human animals and each other. Shedding scientific taxonomies and building queer ecologies in their stead, the film considers the possibility and necessity for new means of being in the world.

Synopsis

A fourteen-year-old girl from a small highland community has a crush on a local lobster fisherman. She persuades him to take her out for a day finds the attraction is mutual. A film about girlhood, fantasy, first love and loneliness.

Synopsis

Based on the true-life story of Helga Schneider who was abandoned by her mother in 1941 when she was only four years old. Helga’s mother had gone to join the Nazi SS where she underwent special training to qualify as a concentration camp guard in Auschwitz. The film is set in the year 2000, following not only Helga and her mother’s journeys but the next two generations of their family and the suffering they endure following revelations of long held secrets around the horrific events that took place over 70 years ago.

Synopsis

'Strange Beasts' is an augmented reality game. It allows you to create and grow your own 'pet'. How far can it go?
Official Selection Annecy Film Festival 2018 - Short Film Competition

Synopsis

Following the fun-loving Kerri as she spends the weekend with her sister's family. When tensions begin to flare, technology provides easy respite. But, when Kerri's gaze shifts from the screen, she discovers a deeper kind of connection.

Synopsis

"Romance, science and conspiracy in the 20th century."

When Erica Thomas died in 2004 she left behind a vast collection of family photos, films, documents and objects dating back to the 1910s. Increasingly lonely in the years after her husband’s early death in 1973, this archive had become her defence against a future too painful to face and revealed experiences her children knew nothing of.

Erica was born in Hungary in 1933 and came to England in 1938 but, despite her private schooling and studies at Cambridge and Oxford, she struggled to become English and to belong. Always feeling herself the outsider, her career nonetheless drew her deep into the hidden recesses of Cold War science; increasingly her internal psychological struggles reflected the trauma of world events.

Spanning 70 years, travelling from Romania to Britain, via America, Antarctica and outer space, Voyageuse is a haunting portrayal of childhood, work, love, loss and grief, revealing one woman's ordinary life, lived through extraordinary times.

Synopsis

In 1977, immigration divides Britain. What happens when a punk fanzine challenges the status quo?
Official Selection Sundance Film Festival 2017 - International Documentary Short Film Selection - World premiere

Synopsis

A re-imagining of Shakespeare's magical fairy tale 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' in a contemporary setting, under a full moon and during a Caribbean Festival in Barbados.
Comedy and chaos ensue when mischievous fairies tamper with the wedding plans of returning Nationals Theseus and Hippolyta, four young lovers, and a group of fishermen keen to perform their potentially prize-winning play.
Themes of Love, multi cultural weddings, mischief, fairy magic, fantasy comedy and Caribbean folklore are explored in a stunning tropical setting.

Synopsis

Juxtaposing images of the production sites of the pharmaceutical-chemical industry with speculations on the historical, social, and material conditions of Cyanotype photography, in this piece artist Kerstin Schroedinger probes into the (gendered) politics of materiality and the (violent) historicities of its form.
The film follows a figure that proceeds through the stages of exposing and developing a Cyanotype. They revisit sites in Seveso, Italy, and Basel, Switzerland that both relate directly to the history of Prussian Blue, a blue synthetic dye.
Official Selection Berlinale 2018 - Forum Expanded Exhibition - "A Mechanism Capable of Changing Itself" - Group exhibition at Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg