Projects in genres: Drama

Synopsis

Daniel, an ambitious and handsome detective sergeant (Nick Moran) takes on the tough contemporary world of a teenage girl in Brighton. But to the dismay of his police partner (Victoria Scarborough), he is relentlessly stalked by a fifteen year-old gang leader (Lara Belmont) who dreams of escape for them both to a romantic tropical Island. As their mutual and forbidden desire increases, events move inexorably to a denouement of tortured and sexual longing and eventual tragedy.
 
Hayley's gang of fourteen year-old girls are on the rampage, mugging young male tourists on Brighton's sea-front. Hayley is half-adolescent and half-woman, as raw and violent as any male counterpart, and just as calculating. She is determined that they will escape their poverty, their crumbling families and dead end prospects by stealing enough money to leave Brighton. The gang thinks she wants to go to London. However, secretly Hayley has almost saved up enough money to take them to Bali, a tropical paradise full, she imagines, of beautiful, androgynous young men. Here she and the gang will find the happiness they crave.
 
When Hayley sees Daniel, a young detective, arresting a robbery suspect she is transfixed. Charismatic, handsome, tough but also strangely vulnerable, he personifies her desires. She falls in love and lust. She must have him at any cost.

Synopsis

In the late 1950s, when her husband Max (Hugh Bonneville) takes up his post as deputy director of a remote psychiatric hospital, Stella Raphael (Natasha Richardson) and her young son, Charlie (Augustus Jeremiah Lewis) are brought to live on the grounds of the asylum.  Stella is soon drawn to charismatic inmate Edgar Stark (Marton Csokas). Undeterred by the warnings from her husband's colleague, Dr Cleave (Ian McKellen), Stella is prepared to risk everything to be with Edgar. Their passionate affair escalates as obsession begins to threaten Stella's love, her sanity and her very life.

Synopsis

What do babies see when they dream? An animated exploration of the mind of the director's sleeping three month old boy. Watch out for those bunnies.

Synopsis

Seated in an unusual bar, a slightly intoxicated and rather troubled man is offered an ominous looking cocktail intriguingly named 'baby's blood' by an altogether too pleasant bartender. But will he drink the simmering concoction or will he let his imagination get the better of him?

Synopsis

A naive young poet pays a visit to his intemperate mentor, with surprising and amusing results.

Synopsis

Julia Lambert is a celebrated and glamorous actress, famous throughout England and happily married for years to her agent, Michael. But underneath the artifice, she is tortured by her fading looks, her philandering husband and her estranged son. When she meets Tom, a young American fan, she is swept off her feet, and embarks on a secret and passionate affair which threatens to create a social scandal that could destroy her career and marriage; until she discovers he has had an ulterior motive all along. There is no way that Julia Lambert is going to be taken for a fool, and she plans her revenge, the ultimate act of a woman scorned.

Synopsis

A Yorkshire milltown in 1957. Ellen Hardy is unhappily married but is close to her ten year old son, Victor. The family has recently moved house and Victor has started at a new school where Ellen has become friendly with his teacher, Kathy Thompson, who is keen to encourage him at art.
 
As the friendship between the two women grows, Ellen's millworker husband, Hardy, feels increasingly alienated at home. Meanwhile, Ellen's sister Alice emigrates to Australia to start a new life and soon the Hardys go on a disastrous seaside holiday.
 
Will Ellen - torn between her duties as a wife and mother and a fear of admitting her feelings for Kathy - also have the courage to break free emotionally and follow her destiny when she returns home?
 
A homage to classic British films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and This Sporting Life, Between Two Women is the first feature from North Country Pictures - committed to bringing to an international audience top quality stories that reflect the history, culture, and literature of the Pennine region past, present, and even future.
 
"A poignant, refreshingly contemporary tale of love across the class barrier" - Radio Times.
 
"The script, acting, and directing are top notch. If this film had been produced in Hollywood,  it would be synonymous with the word Oscar" - Toronto Free Press.
 
"The bleak industrial cities in the north of England have been the settings of many a gritty drama. With Between Two Women writer-director Steven Woodcock has made a notably lyrical film amid a grim setting" - Los Angeles Times.

Synopsis

Molly wakes dazed on the floor. Joe has a gun. Not all is going to plan.

Synopsis

When Hassan an asylum seeker gets stopped for speeding, his is wrongly suspected of being a terrorist by an over enthusuastuc 'bobby' on the beat. Hassan knows that any black mark against him and he and his family will be deported, so he has to come up with a plan - fast!

Synopsis

A thief breaks into a house and finds himself trapped in the dark with a somnambulist, a drunk and an insomniac houseguest. Told almost entirely with stereo sound, this simple comedy seeks delight in showing us what is going on only when it matters.

Synopsis

Blind Flight is the true account of the kidnapping of Brian Keenan and his subsequent captivity with John McCarthy in the Lebanon in 1986.
 
Brian Keenan and John McCarthy spent four and a half years together, confined underground and chained to the wall of their cell. The two men, pawns in a game of international politics, were utterly different in personality, physical appearance and background.
 
The bullish working-class Irish Republican Keenan, who went to the Lebanon as a teacher to escape the horrors of Belfast, and his youthful English cellmate, the handsome, charming, upper-class McCarthy, a journalist ironically reporting on Keenan's own captivity, could easily have found each other at opposite ends of a gun barrel in the streets of Keenan's Belfast. Instead, in the face of the most acute deprivation and under the constant threat of death at the hands of their captors, they forged a relationship that transcended all that appeared to divide them.
 
Blind Flight tells the compelling story of this extraordinary relationship as both men resurrect their deepest memories, feelings, fears and loves which makes the film a 'love story' in the fullest and most humanistic sense.

Synopsis

Running from a dark secret, Danish backpacker Mike Hammershoi (Anders W. Berthelsen) arrives at Black's estate in the Scottish Borders, looking for work. Cut off from the outside world, Francis Black) Peter Mullan, the blind owner, lives there in a shuttered-up, decaying mansion, with his elderly mother Bella (Phyllida Law).
 
Francis reluctantly offers the traveller a low-paid job in the yard. Put off by the unsettling atmosphere, Mike declines the offer. But as he turns to go, he sets eyes on Rachel (Jodhi May), Francis' enigmatic young wife, and changes his mind. Mike starts work on the farm, dumping the debris of the Blacks' once-successful business into the mud pit - a bottomless vortex of quicksand at the end of the land.
 
Mike soon realises that Francis, increasingly embittered by his blindness, exerts a domineering power over Rachel. Rachel, emotionally suffocated by her husband, is increasingly attracted to Mike, whose presence awakens her pent-up sexual desire. Unable to resist each other, they become lovers. As the sexual tension increases, so too does Francis' jealousy rage. In a fit of anger, Francis sacks the traveller. The threat of Mike's departure forces Rachel to choose between her husband and her lover. Unaware of his dark past, Rachel decides to run away with Mike. Seething with fury, Francis stands, knife in hand, by the edge of the mud-pit waiting for the unsuspecting lovers as they prepare to make their escape.