The story of what happened to an English town during World War One with almost all of its men fighting abroad and its women and children left behind. The North East was in the front line, thanks to its shipyards and munitions factories.
Using archive and contemporary footage and audio, this film collages the stories of people from Tyneside and Wearside to uncover just what life was like on the home front, with bombs falling on Britain for the first time, conscientious objectors sentenced to death, and women working as doctors, tram conductors and footballers. The narrative moves from an Edwardian golden era, in which sport grew in popularity and aircraft and cars pointed to a bright new future, to a war that horrifically reversed this progress. In the Battle of the Somme, British, French and German armies fought one of the most traumatic battles in military history. Over the course of just four months, more than one million soldiers were captured, wounded or killed in a confrontation of unimaginable horror.
In a post-apocalyptic industrial town, a father and his daughter embark on an adventure in search of a better world. Searching for Sunnyvale is a mixed-media animated short film developed and funded through Creative England's scheme iShorts, an extraordinary tale of paternal love, hope, imagination and... tinned pineapple.
An experimental documentary, chronicalling the director's maternal grandmother's life in Communist Hungary. The film serves as a memento of times past and as a reminder of how socialism colonized the souls of a generation.
Women in Pictish garb! Tri-partite geometry! Psychedelic sitars! Heavy Magick!
The Return from Annwn is a mytho-ecological short film and digital project by Annwn Collective, depicting a trans-dimensional quest to restore cosmic equilibrium through female alignment. Borrowing from Celtic mythology, Pictish symbolism, Japanese butoh dancing and the Western hermetic magic tradition, The Return from Annwn chronicles an atmospheric journey by six summoned spectres through the landscapes of England. Paying equal homage to the filmic rituals of Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren and the aesthetics of 80s fantasy epics, the film performs a form of spiritual archaeology on a world where objects have the power of change and lasers emanate from pineal eyes.
The sword must be drawn and the stars realigned! Come forth Guardians of Annwn, come forth!
Set in a former Cold War era civil defence bunker turned data centre buried 30 metres underground in Stockholm. Part Bond villain lair, part retro-futuristic spaceship, the film explores the temporal nature of data space and geology. Once housing servers for WikiLeaks, issues of privacy, surveillance and digital sovereignty emanate.
A witty take on the contingencies of the conditions in which to best read Marx.
Filmed over 6 days, the time-lapse technique compresses a classic text (Karl Marx's 'Das Kapital') into a 9 minute experience, raising questions as to how film might transcend verbal language. The picture is offset by David Cunningham’s score which is composed solely from the two words of the book’s title.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand
Consumed is a cinematic journey through the landscapes, mines, factories, and shipyards of Chinese production.
Blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, a single worker narrates his story to the rhythm of industrial machinery, re-framing supply chains as a narrative performance at global scale.
Orphan episode of a lost detective series. A rookie detective is teamed up with a seasoned murder cop, whose break-down results in the disintegration of the show.
Amy Johnson worked as a typist for a firm of solicitors before her record- breaking solo flight from Croydon to Australia in 1930. This film has been created with an Underwood 315 typewriter as a celebration of her journey.
An intimate view of the studio of American composer Laurie Spiegel (born 1945). Known for her electronic-music compositions and her algorithmic composition software, the film also reveals all manner of music and technology paraphernalia, from music scores to DIY inventions and quirky toy collections. The soundtrack features electronic music composed by Spiegel, with her voiceover musing on electronic music and the compositional process.
