Projects in genres: Experimental

Synopsis

At 4.00 am on Tuesday 13th February 1996, a man tries to murder his wife. Implicit, dissociated and somatic elements of this traumatic memory are explored through the juxtaposition of images of light, flesh, blood and text in this silent, autobiographical film.

Synopsis

Takafa is a documentary essay, a film about memory and the most necessary forms of belonging, through a search for the role played in the city by Istanbul´s street dogs and their relationship to its human populations. Despite several major attempts by Istanbul´s rulers, politicians and planners over the last 400 years to exterminate them, the city´s street dogs have persisted thanks to an enduring alliance with widespread civilian communities, which recognize and defend their right to co-exist. Takafa is structured around readings by internationally acclaimed storyteller, essayist, and critic John Berger. The film opens a window on the contested relationships between power and the public, community and categorisation (in location and identity), and the ongoing struggle / resistance against a single way of seeing and being.

Synopsis

Two wives and two soldiers divided by war discuss the horror of the conflict.

This heightened short form drama utilises poetic language to open dialogue with its audience concerning the transience of life and the consequences of a fictional war on British soil.

Synopsis

The feature debut of award-winning filmmaker Oliver Harrison, The Fallen Word is a dark 'fairy-tale' - a poetic, surrealistic fantasy. Under the brutal rule of a new religious sect, art, music and free speech have been outlawed; the poets are the last line of resistance. These wordsmiths have formed themselves into gangs and - in verbal duels - battle for supremacy. This is a tale of love lost and found, of friendship and betrayal and of the magical power of language and words.

Synopsis

An unseen woman witnesses the ordinary oppression and fear of the early years of National Socialism. She describes the sound of screaming she regularly hears on passing a military barracks whilst walking from her house to the station. Images of the barracks recur throughout the film, suggesting the routine tyranny that precipitates the woman's increasing fear and eventual journey into exile. The film's structure of repetition and retelling foregrounds the way in which her life is stunted by increasing marginalisation and terror. "I’m only just eighteen but sometimes I already feel so old that I think of dying," she writes in a letter to her would-be lover. The View from Our House is based in part on the memories, unsent letters and notebooks of a young photographer who lived in Berlin-Tempelhof. Aspects of her life are mapped out within this small area of Berlin through a succession of haunted images and sounds that imbue place with a sense of memory and history.

Synopsis

TRANS is an intimate moving image portrait focusing on Kali. Exploring themes of transformation and identity, the film constructs various scenes based on her thoughts, feelings and imaginings as she reflects on the pain of her metamorphosis.

Synopsis

Inspired by a visit to Zabriskie Point – this film re-visits and contemporises Antonioni’s 1970 film of the same name. Aligning with Antonioni's stated intentions – to produce a work as "an idea in landscape" – the film undertakes a programme of visual and social research for the earlier film.

Synopsis

Zagreus is a film about the psychic wound at the heart of the modern world we live in, a wounding that has detached us from the primal energies that were our lifeblood at the dawning of civilization, in exchange for a devotion to the dual hegemony of logic and technology.

Synopsis

The corpse of a murdered woman finds its final resting place in the murky waters of the Ohio River. Her demise is at first unnoticed. But soon the frozen moment of her own death disturbs the cycle of the living above, encompassing in its breathless embrace both the guilty and the innocent.
Crystal World uses underwater puppets, mono ammonium phosphate, prisms and time-lapse photography to crystallize fragments of Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter.

Synopsis

From the beginning of the 21st century to the present day, a love and unity slowly begins to fall apart.

Synopsis

Another day unfolds in an anonymous woman’s life, as she cooks and cleans for her uncommunicative husband and sullen grown-up children. Then, late in the afternoon, she has an unusual visitor.

Synopsis

Shot in England and Nigeria this evocative film builds on the lives of African women living in the UK separated from their families.
The stories are based on news reports and Joy's own life, including voicemails left on her answer-machine by the legendary singer Nina Simone, her self proclaimed ‘Spiritual Mother’.