Three narratives unfold together. Inside a vast nature reserve sits a solitary building, a café, where an important meeting is being held by executives. Outside in the park, the collective singular lounge about wearing fancy garments. Images are exchanged, participation simulated: the interminable present. Meanwhile, the dormant wildlife fades away.
In The Prophet, BAFTA-nominated director and composer Gary Tarn (Black Sun, 2005) takes Kahlil Gibran’s classic novel and spins it into a cinematic exploration of love, life and loss. An intimate narration, performed by the British actress Thandie Newton, is integrated into a minimal score for orchestra, guitar, cello and synthesiser. This fictional text is juxtaposed against footage shot on Tarn’s solo travels to Lebanon, Serbia, New York, Milan and London. Finding beauty in the everyday, the film leaves space for each viewer to find their own meaning : an uninhibited eye observing the world through the lens of poetic wisdom.
First published in 1923, The Prophet, Gibran's hugely popular guide to living, has sold millions of copies worldwide and was the bible of the 60's counter-culture. It continues to be read and to inspire people around the world today.
A series of visions relayed through a heightened consciousness. These views frame the shadowy recesses that offer access to the underworld and draw us closer to the presences that lurk beyond these thresholds.
Voluntarily locked in a cell for 48 hours with no restrictions and no outside help three emotional archetypes battle for psychological supremacy before they can be destroyed by their own weaknesses.
Towards the end of her life Susan explores her relationship with her nineteen year old daughter Samantha. Throughout the film Susan is dying of cancer - although this is not expressed definitively to the audience. Although the main concern of the film is the mother-daughter interaction, a third character is imparted through the dialogue in the form of an absent father.
A portrait of a tumbledown Pyrenean farmhouse as seen through the eyes and ears of the family that have lived there on and off for the last 22 years. With music by Scanner and a range of voices from the filmmaker’s sound archive, the work explores notions of nostalgia, memory and place.
A man caught by his own emotional weakness in the limbo between life and death must find acceptance in himself and follow the eerie calm and reassurance of The Voice into the eternal lake of Death.
SOUTHBANK UNSEEN will blow our minds and get us thinking through four, visually dynamic and aurally arresting, documentary dramas that delve into the unseen.
These short documentary dramas give us an alternative view of London’s South Bank from the eyes and ears of four extraordinarily gifted individuals.
The film documents the solitary existence of Jake, a man who lives in isolation in the middle of the forest in remote Scotland. It follows the character's unconventional life, capturing moments of profound beauty. Jack is seen in all seasons, surviving frugally, passing the time with strange projects, living the radical dream he had as a younger man, a dream he spent two years working at sea to realise.
Emily wanders the places of bygone memory with her Polaroid camera, trying to recapture the times now lost. The places are like photos, disjointed and divided, as she takes her own picture again and again. A short film about love lost and the hole it leaves behind.
