Beginning in Vienna where the filmmaker meets her father, David, whom she hasn’t seen since she was two. Through a mixture of onscreen text, sit down interviews and archival footage, David’s early life as a teenage activist in Northern Ireland is revealed. The film then travels to Belfast and segues into an impossible reconstruction of David’s early years. In and attempt to better know him, Garnett uses previously recorded audio interviews to skillfully craft a lip-synced, cross-gender performance where she impersonates the his youthful presence and casts a transgender actress in the role of his girlfriend. The film cycles through various camera modes – narrative vignettes on RED alongside handheld camcorder footage of contemporary Belfast street life mixed with these verbatim re-enactments – to create a fragmented account of a teenager struggling to find an identity in a rapidly deteriorating society, and the parallel struggle of a filmmaker to connect with her estranged father. The layers of texture in this film mirror the fractured lens of history, and point to the impossibility of filmmaking as a container for 'Truth'. In TROUBLE, cinema is a means of rebuilding family ties of highlighting the complexities of representation and the construction of identity.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Experimenta Strand - World premiere
Exploring how punk influenced politics in late-1970s Britain, when a group of artists united to take on the National Front, armed only with a fanzine and a love of music. Developed from Rubika Shah's short film WHITE RIOT: LONDON (Sundance 2017, Berlin 2017).
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Documentary Competition - World premiere
Winner Grierson Award for Best Documentary, BFI London Film Festival 2019
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2020 - Generation 14plus - International premiere
A forensic documentary telling the story of Operation Ajax, the CIA/MI6 staged coup in 1953 in Iran that overthrew Prime Minister Mossadegh.
Official Selection Telluride Film Festival 2019 - World premiere
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Documentary Competition - International premiere
Under Paris' glittering Eiffel Tower, illegal Senegalese migrants sell miniature souvenirs of the monument to support their families back home. Far from their loved ones and hounded by the police, each day is a struggle through darkness in the City of Lights.
Based on a true story, a seven year old boy struggles to make sense of words on the page. But when Mike is diagnosed with dyslexia and the teachers continue to fail him, his mother takes matters into her own hands to help her son fulfil his true potential.
No road. No voice. No future. Deep in the jungle a road is quietly destroying a protected rainforest, causing conflict and fear. Yet for some indigenous communities, desperate for change, it brings the promise of a better life… but at what cost?
Executive Producer Fernando Meirelles (Academy Award-nominated director of "City of God") and Malian musician Inna Modja take us on an epic journey along Africa's Great Green Wall - an ambitious vision to grow an 8000km ‘wall of trees’ stretching across the entire continent to fight back against desertification, climate change and migration.
Official Selection Venice Film Festival 2019 - World premiere
Oscar-winning writer/director Alex Gibney’s revelatory CITIZEN K is an intimate yet sweeping look at post-Soviet Russia from the perspective of the enigmatic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oligarch turned political dissident.
Official Selection Venice Film Festival 2019 - Out of Competition - World premiere
Official Selection Toronto International Film Festival 2019 - Contemporary World Cinema
A portrait of the struggles and triumphs of Australian footballer Adam Goodes - a hero on and off the field, as both a decorated sportsman and an indigenous-rights activist.
Official Selection Toronto International Film Festival 2019 - TIFF Docs - International premiere
Ravaged by war, the world recovers from a divided past. The last remaining survivors struggle to not only survive, but to also find their place. Morality is tested to its limits and a harsh environment has moulded demented madmen. Exploring themes of mental illness and equality, two strangers - a mute, and a man escaping his past - venture into the quiet world side by side. One looking to save his kidnapped lover from a masked gang of sociopaths, and the other seeking his stolen cassette player while being haunted by bizarre and ominous dreams. Both of them have one destination - a peaceful community only for women - a place called 'Eve.'
This is a ghost story. A series of uncanny events lead The Seeker to a forest in Poland where she meets a distraught elderly woman who hands her a note written in Polish that she cannot understand. Returning months later with an interpreter she hears the story of The Deathless Woman, a Roma matriarch who was buried alive in the forest by German soldiers in 1942.
The Deathless Woman draws us from the scene of her death to other sites of Roma persecution. She hovers above the Gypsy Camp at Birkenau on the night the Roma revolt against their Nazi captors. She glides under the lake in Várpalota where 118 women and children were massacred in 1945. She passes through the burnt-out house in Tatárszentgyörgy where neo-Nazis murdered a Roma family in 2009. She even crosses into the virtual realm and enters the digital landscapes of the Internet, encountering hate speech and video games where players are invited to gun down unarmed Roma as they run through the streets.
The film interweaves The Deathless Woman’s ghostly narration, The Seeker’s journey of discovery, fantastical re-imaginings of buried secrets; and documentary testimony from witnesses to atrocities against the Roma in Poland and Hungary.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Experimenta Strand - World premiere
A group of artists on a small Greek island build an experimental music festival aiming to bridge the gap between the Greeks and the islands refugee community. Stories from Leros.
