Takako Shirawa has spent the last 36 years creating an extraordinary day centre for autistic people in Abeno, Osaka. Nestling on a quiet neighbourhood corner, Atelier Corners began life as a family run sanctuary for local autistic children and has developed into a pioneering site of artistic experiment with its members becoming renowned artists, exhibited in Japan and worldwide. Award winning artist and filmmaker Richard Butchins (himself disabled) visited the centre with disabled dancer Kazuyo Morita and spent two years documenting and creating an award winning video installation about the artists and their home.
This film shows the artists, the art and the woman that made it possible. It’s a testament to integration and the remarkable minds of the people that inhabit the building that is Atelier Corners. The film is part documentary and part artists’ moving image, a reflective and thoughtful account exploring the experience of disability in Japan, what is positive in the act of creation and the struggle against social exclusion, and how to foster and nurture the spirit of human life in a country that has traditionally excluded and hidden its disabled population from view.
Desperately building against the inevitability of time, a restless young woman is awaiting another upcoming loss. But maybe more important things never seem to be told.
A snapshot of an edgeland, Tilbury in Essex, during the months leading to the Brexit deadline in March 2019. The film moves back and forth between the individual, human-scale portraits of migration and the representation of the town’s economic activity.
A double portrait of two women whose lives have been shaped by a shared passion for homemaking and hospitality. Over the course of the film we see Rosemary and Nancy in their cottage in Yorkshire, where they have settled in retirement. We hear them speak about the project they embarked on together, which saw them shelter and re-house over five hundred families in Massachusetts over a thirty year period, as well as providing a personal and historical context to their story.
WHAT DOES WATER TASTE LIKE? questions the production of identity as it relates to the filmmaker's personal affiliations as a British-Nigerian. Prompted by intimate conversations, the film conjoins footage and voices of the past with their counterparts in the present-tense.
A young male patient of a psychiatric hospital, witnesses the death of another Black male patient at the hands of white staff. Blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, this work draws from real life cases of Black mentally ill men who have died as a result of excessive force.
Using a visual rich balance of documentary and animation KINGS OF SUMAVA poetically explores the duality of hero, villain and reunites former Czech immigrant Vlasta Bukovsky and Czech people smuggler Josep Hasil. The infamous boarder guard who lead those who needed to leave communist Czechoslovakia through the mountains of Sumava and to freedom. Due to the communist regimes failed attempts to catch Josef his family were imprisoned for over 180 years.
A short film about the Argentine electroacoustic composer Beatriz Ferreyra, an original pioneer of early musique concrète alongside Pierre Schaeffer during the ‘50s and ‘60s. Here she discusses her ‘sound hunting’ recording techniques, and other thoughts on sound montage and spatialization. Featuring creaking doors, barking dogs and rainbow hands.
Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 2020
Welcome to the age of cosmic radiation! THE PHANTOM MENACE compiles stories from the recent past of interaction with cosmic rays at ever descending altitudes. Planes crashing, computers malfunctioning and elections going haywire - these were just the prequel to the future.
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2020 - Forum Expanded - World premiere
a ROLE to PLAY brings together the lived experiences and dreams of Bolsover residents, one of the most deprived towns in the middle of England. The film tells stories of the impact of economic changes in a post-industrial Derbyshire constituency where coal was once king.
An inquiry into proximity and empathy, explored through the working life of a care worker as he builds supportive relationships with three young adults with severe physical disabilities and autism.
A man in a room, in a film – it is the becoming of something and simultaneously becoming in itself. Nothing is as solid as we believe.
The film explores our perception of time, bodies and objects, and our inability to comprehend the full motion of things.
