Projects in genres: Experimental

Synopsis

In 1904 the Elan Valley, in Wales, was flooded to create reservoirs for Birminghams's water supply. Many buildings were destroyed and over a hundred people were displaced. Keepsake uses original footage, archive maps, stills and domestic objects; the waters of the reservoir are 'drained' to reveal what was lost.

Synopsis

A collaboration with poet and broadcaster Ian McMillan reflecting on his recent trip to Russia - a short visual poem. A combination of studio set photography, animation and motion graphics illuminate this thoughtful meditation on the notions of travel and identity.

Synopsis

Gilly Booth's film One Dau Trois (123) uses three languages, two countries and two principal actors to etch out a story of passion, control, power and indifference. It draws from styles and techniques of French avant-garde cinema. It thieves Godard's directorial devices (ad hoc dialogue, actors responding through ear-phone to director's questions) to construct a "documentary" love-story based less on Godard's claim that artifice lead to truth than the idea that artifice follows its own law. The characters have it tough: A and B can barely cope with their lines, and with the insistent interference of the camera, the director and the films stylistic pretensions. They try to act cool, and discuss serious topics (only to be inundated by graphics spouting French poststructuralism and an anarchist discussing her hairdresser). Caught in the purgatory of multiple digital video and 35mm endings, the enigma of the film is cruelly withheld - unless one is versed in semaphore.

Synopsis

By 2050, lifestyle is designed by the Corporate State. Unhealthy food, obesity, famine and war are illegal.
 
Martin Dwyer, a mid-level executive, reports to the Head Office for a routine review. Instead, he is invited up to the top floor, the Executive Floor.

Synopsis

After an unnatural death comes an unnatural burial and a reluctant witness who is slowly losing his mind as he finds a parallel between the correct ways of disposing of a body and the improper. What happens when somebody dies in suspicious circumstances? 
PANINO is a psychological thriller which guides between what is a moral procedure and what is criminally insane. Directed by Richard Lawson, the central theme of the film is how one mentally copes with death. PANINO is a psychological thriller following the broken thoughts and accounts of a man under police questioning who losses his ability to distinguish between the real and the imagined world.

Synopsis

When we close our eyes, the shapes and patterns we see are called phosphenes. This experiment in documentary unfolds like a 'look and learn' phosphenes primer. Animated flowcharts and rich shimmering images uncover some surprising facts about the visual phenomenon that every human experiences.

Synopsis

Pipes Cups and Switches is about how the human facial expression has extended to switches and other inanimate objects. And how pipes look like neck joints and the back of the head with the ears sticking out, resembles a cup. The film is shot to the accompaniment of pop and techno music. There is no dialogue except for a few words spoken by some of the participants.

Synopsis

Riva is the portrait of a woman, Riva Ben Eliezer, now ninety years old. How do you look at the life of someone who has lived through so much? I would look at her hands, wrinkled and old, and think, these are the hands that did all those things, that were communist in Palestine, that were imprisoned and tortured, that bore children and a great and terrible war, that lived in Siberia, that taught kindergarten, that wrote books. These hands, no other, did this, and this is what they look like now. This is what time and life has done to my grandmother's hands.
 
But the film is more than that. It is more than a portrait of a woman who lived through extraordinary times, who was a Jew in a place and time when there was nothing and nowhere worse to be. It is the portrait of a whole life, not just the sections that have the most drama. It is the portrait of her now - for now contains all her past, somehow, in her hands and in her face. In her voice and especially in her laugh.
 
It is a private film made for the public. The use of hand processed images, with their patina of blotches and scratches, creats a space for Riva to exist, where the presentation of her ninety-year-old body is not intrusive but respectful. It is a private film also because it was made in private, just me and her, so our relationship becomes a part of it.
 
It is not my intention with this film to deify Riva. Just to show her, as I see her, because it is important to see the lives of others, lives that have been deeply lived, as Riva's has.

Synopsis

Shadows is a short experimental film about the fact that no matter where we come from or who we are or what language we speak, we are the same colour ie black. The languages spoken in the film are Chinese, Russian, Indian, African and English. The film was created by filming the shadows of people talking against a wall.

Synopsis

In the ex-colliery villages of East Durham, there is an abyss: falling down it is an easy thing. In a dangerous landscape, Barry, 40-year-old ex-youth worker, occasional labourer, wryly comic storyteller and single father, watches out for his 12-year-old son Callum. His eye is drawn to Emma, a 22-year-old with two children, Jade, 7 and Shannon, 4.  Barry likes to help, likes kids and likes Emma. But Emma has her own worries.
 
The film follows her personal journey as she single-mindedly tries to get her partner Darren off heroin: as she acquires the cocktail of drugs that will see him through his 'rattle' and takes him to 'The Breakies', a bleakly isolated collection of fishing huts, out beyond the steelworks, at the mouth of the Tees. And it follows Barry, Jade, Shannon and Callum in tow, picking up the pieces in a community that has moved further and further away from the economic mainstream. The abyss yawns and Barry negotiates the difficult terrain opening up from his own serious misjudgements. Watched by the disapproving Callum, his attempts to help Emma draw him ever closer to the edge.

Synopsis

One soundtrack runs simultaneously to three visual narratives, as snatched moments bring back memories of a younger self. A film about time and growing up.

Synopsis

The Commuter is a Surrealist film in which an office worker shaves his face off every morning in order to blend in with all the other faceless commuters on their way to work. A live-action/digital hybrid, it was repainted on computer frame by frame.