Projects in genres: Music

Synopsis

When we close our eyes, the shapes and patterns we see are called phosphenes. This experiment in documentary unfolds like a 'look and learn' phosphenes primer. Animated flowcharts and rich shimmering images uncover some surprising facts about the visual phenomenon that every human experiences.

Synopsis

Fighting over a television remote control, an eight year old girl and her little brother break a window. Mum will soon be home. What will they do? What will they tell her?
 
The two of them come up with a quick scheme to sort out the grave problem at hand; an emotional roller coaster that marks the end of their innocent cosy world. In the next ten minutes big sister comes up with the perfect plan and to her surprise, little brother becomes her unquestioning follower, or so she thinks.

Synopsis

A low-key indie comedy about collaborating creatively with friends. Two young men in a London rock band have a large concert in ten days. They try to keep their plans and friendship together during the tense build up. Ultimately they triumph.

Synopsis

The film is a modern drama set in London and explores the moral vacuum at the heart of contemporary youth culture.

The film portrays the lives of a brother and sister, highly educated and in their early twenties, who embark on a course of theft, deceit and eventual murder, in order to have the lifestyle they feel they are entitled to.

This leads to a web of intrigue and counter-plotting that eventually leads all the characters into the same bleak universe where all is possible.

The film intricately fuses the different art forms - Music, Drama and Dance - and contains original songs and music especially written for it, and highly innovative dance sequences which give expression to, and explore the emotional nature of, modern society.

Synopsis

Silent film with 1920s soundtrack.
 
Millie and her flapper friends go to the beach to view the solar eclipse of 1927. Millie bumps into George, also on the beach with a sunbathing band. Frolicking ensures, watched by Spike through a telescope. George disappears at sea.

Synopsis

A guy walks into a bar and takes on a challenge to win a pot of money. Unfortunately for him, he doesn't listen properly to the rules of the challenge, with shocking results. The story is told in funky rap-style dialogue.

Synopsis

As much documentary as it is religious art, as much religious art as it is rock and roll, as much rock and roll as it is rhetoric and as much rhetoric as it is cinema.
This unique, kaleidoscopic film is "a richly cinematic experience" inside the lives of worshippers from the congregation of The Greater Bethany Community Church, (now The City of Refuge), in South Central Los Angeles. Bishop Noel Jones, (brother of Grace Jones), is both shepherd and rock as the film weaves between community life, gospel song and his electric church sermons.
Official Selection Edinburgh International Film Festival 2002 - World premiere
Official Selection Locarno Film Festival 2002
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2002

Synopsis

As Cinzas de Deus is a visual poem in a universe of realities.
 
Set in the ruins of an abandoned, once grandiose 19th century city, the film follows a woman, Helo, entering a world of memory and feeling, where characters - perhaps ‘trapped souls’ - are living and re-living moments from an unspecified past.
 
Helo penetrates their dream-like reality, visions of her own subconscious, absorbs them, challenges them, releases them. Their memory bank gradually erased, they disappear into the ether. 
 
In a climactic finale she confronts her own personal nemesis. She survives the life-and-death confrontation, and, left behind, she dances alone, immersed in dust and eternity.

Synopsis

Asian Invasion is a fly on the wall, behind the scenes documentary of what was going to be one of the biggest events of its kind. Until things went wrong! This documentary follows a group of Asian models and the organisers as they try to put on the show of shows with Bollywood stars and Mainstream Bhangra groups participating.

Synopsis

Isaac Julien's BaadAsssss Cinema is a groundbreaking documentary that looks back to the soulful, strange days of the 70s to explore an exciting and controversial era of film history: the phenomenon that was blaxploitation.

Synopsis

A movie that tells the story of an archetypal human life using images taken from All around the World and The Last 100 Years of Cinema.

The images span the microcosm - inside the body - through the individual - the first cry of a new born baby - to the macrocosm - accumulated archive footage of ritual celebration and the carnage of war.

The editing, music, and the mythic narrative arc of the material is designed to take the viewer on a roller coaster tour of the human body and life cycle. Every possible depiction of the human life from microscopic medical to portraits and newsreels, from births to deaths, are cut to a powerful music track by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead to create a powerful and highly emotional film, with peaks of ecstasy and troughs of despair.

The power of this film derives from the force of numbers; each face, each person, each body, each glimpse of anatomy, is both abstracted and dignified by being part of a huge flow, a torrent of humanity larger that any of us can conceive.

A Century of Human Drama and Struggle captured in Moving Images.

The film is supported by a highly innovative website project which can be seen at www.bodysong.com.

Synopsis

This 3-hour documentary tells the story of Studio One, Jamaica's most important record label in the history of Reggae.

Filmed in Kingston, the documentary has interviews with many of the artists who Studio One made famous - Horace Andy, Alton Ellis, Ken Boothe, Sugar Minott etc.

The main interview is with Clement 'Sir Coxsone' Dodd, owner and founder, and the documentary tells the story of his life and the impact he has had on Reggae music in Jamaica and the rest of the world.

Studio One is the foundation label of Jamaican Reggae. Often described as the Motown of Jamaica, Studio One is where the career of literally hundreds of Reggae artists began - Bob Marley and the Wailers, Alton Ellis, The Heptones, Ken Boothe, The Skatalites, Burning Spear - everyone! Lee Perry was a handyman there and Prince Buster a bouncer.

The film also visits Trenchtown's old Dancehalls, the Alpha School for wayward Boys (run by Nuns), Tuff Gong Studios and Pressing Plant, Orange street (Jamaica's Tin Pan Alley) and many sites relating to the story.

There is rarely seen vintage footage of musical performances, interviews, Haile Selaisse's arrival in Jamaica and even early music videos (from the 1960s). Much of this footage has rarely been seen outside Jamaica.

Music is featured heavily in the documentary and the film mixes narrative and musical elements throughout.