Projects in genres: Experimental and with status: Post-production

Synopsis

An atmospheric journey into the heart of modern England. Filmmaker Louis Price weaves together scenes of everyday life within the Black Country in the West Midlands. An area once so industrialised the sky appeared black during the day, and red during the night, today the Black Country is a place of ghosts, existing in the aftermath of its industrial past. BLACK COUNTRY - A FILM FROM ENGLAND takes place entirely in one day, observing crematoriums, night clubs, UKIP pubs, living rooms and Council Chambers with a hallucinatory eye that presents no easy answers, or neat narrative resolves. Mixing a combination of industrial archive footage, experimental sound design (wax cylinder recordings, player piano, distorted 78 RPM records), with stripped back austere camera compositions and mysterious, mundane and sometimes unsettling subjects, a distorted postcard from a confused and increasingly indecipherable England.

Synopsis

An expansive journey through the Kazakh steppe, this film piece seeks to excavate layers of myth, history and geology to reveal the shifting fault lines between a government, its people and their land. The film brings into focus Kazakhstan’s search for a post-Soviet identity and a state-sponsored programme of cultural production that on the one hand connects back to the ancient folklore and belief systems of the Silk Road, while on the other, seeks to embrace the values of Western capitalism. Adopting an experimental documentary form, On A Clear Day provides a meditative faux observational film about the continual process of construction involved in nationhood and national identity. Shot on 16mm, the camera is drawn across the terrain of Eastern Kazakhstan through a series of encounters that offer a translation of a reality within the challenging social and political context of Kazakhstan. The Kazakh steppe creates a rhythm for the film as the vast terrain forms the conditions for each encounter with locations including the Bogatyr open quarry, Semipalatinsk nuclear test site, Ekibastuz generating station and the newly constructed city of Nur-Sultan. De-literalised through the use of constructed as well as un-orchestrated scenes; the film attempts to apprehend truths. Its facts, however, are always based on fictions - the ancient myths and folklore of Kazakhstan itself.

Synopsis

Damascus as a neo art form. A thirst for abstraction at a time when immediacy and simultaneity – culminating in the multiple strand captioning of TV news screens, or the instant feedback of Twitter, tyrannical demands, forcing aesthetic sensibilities to seek new ways of slowing down. As they float through a plastic representation of time-space (blank as Richard Hell) we need a way to associate their blankness to action as it eases us to a pseudo-understanding of a mindless state we only observe. Damascus as an end to mindwash religion, nowhere politics and bogus philosophy. The first film is the visual film. A waltz through the night of city that transcends itself. Three principals enacting the dance to death of relationships, plurality and urban living. The visual element of the project flows through time and arches through experience that answers nobodies' questions. It is disorientating: both musically and formally. Experience is placed front and centre, whether that be disconnection or sexual release. Best invoked by the term Psychogeography/ Which was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."

Synopsis

Max lives to explore the world, so when his best friend Jason asks him on a journey up onto the Tibetan Plateau in search of new sources of Yak wool it seems like a slam dunk. But for once Max is reluctant to go away as his wife, Rebecca, is six months pregnant. But with her encouragement he changes his mind and so begins a journey into a ‘heart of darkness’. Inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. The film was shot on location in Tibet, China, the Himalayas, Oman, Morocco, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Poland and Northern Ireland. For the audience it is both an epic physical journey and an intimate mental exploration. The story has moments of life and death, birth and burial and as such has much in common with the Tibetan book of the dead and the concept of the wheel of life.

Synopsis

The People's Cloud is a project investigating the ecology and impact of cloud computing on the lives of those who use it, the places it is physically located in and the people who work to maintain it. Traveling Europe in search of the infrastructure of the internet, the film surveys the acoustic properties of such locations and their relationship with the overall environmental and geopolitical impact of mobile data storage. Interviews take place with engineers, technicians, manufacturers, marketing experts, salespeople, economists, husbands, wives, family members, academics, cultural thinkers and artists and we discover what 'the cloud' means to them and what this data boom has meant to their lives.

Synopsis

A feature film comprising three interlinking stories all set at the same warehouse at three different times, the first when the warehouse is in ruins, the second when it is in development and the third after it has been converted into luxury accommodation. Part 1: The Girl I Left Behind Me Part 2: The Rugby Club Part 3: To Reach a Racing Heart The three stories all interlink and entwine with each other in a variety of ways: secular and spiritual, blackly comic and disturbing, surreal and moving-one place, three stories, eleven lives, three nights, no walls. Drowning Room Only.

Synopsis

A film about a place, its people and all the things that make life...life. Told through the eyes of ten different perspectives this is a film about love and relationships in the city. We follow Grace, a writer researching her new project. Weighed down with the guilt of her current relationship, and surrounded by the very things she’s attempting to write about yet also trying to avoid, Grace struggles with that burning question - what is love all about? Her research - a “I Saw You” column in a local magazine, allows her to dip into the lives of others also dealing with the very same thing. Funny, heart-warming, sometimes harrowing, we explore the concept of love. Whether it be nature, nurture, or in fact just science. Ten stories. Eight writers. Ten directors. One question... What is love all about?

Synopsis

Daisy returns home for her mother's birthday, ready for a weekend of family rituals and nostalgia. As old home videos reveal the richness of her own childhood, she faces the emotional weight of her looming abortion appointment.