Projects in genres: Climate / Environment

Synopsis

To the right, a distorting face inside a rectangle tries to avoid being classified as human - but fails! To the left, algorithms including Boolean operators seek to refine a description of image content with varying amounts of confidence.

Synopsis

A hand-crafted celluloid film that uses the cycle of life over one year at an English allotment to structure a personal, poetic, hypnotic regression in time of a family's journey through Invitro Fertilisation process (IVF) for their second child, inviting the audience to philosophise and connect with our relationship to the world.

Synopsis

A sci-fi short set in the aftermath of an eco-disaster. An abandoned nuclear reactor under the biblical town of Bethlehem has been converted into an enormous orchard. Using heirloom seeds collected in the final days before the apocalypse, a group of scientists are preparing to replant the soil above. In the hospital wing of the underground compound, the orchard’s ailing founder is on her deathbed, as her young successor, who is born underground, comes to visit her. The talk between the two scientists soon evolves into an intimate dialogue about memory, exile and inherited trauma. Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Official Short Film Competition - Experimenta Strand

Synopsis

Three characters search for meaning in an urban weed. The Narrator pursues perdikaki to find the woman first seen picking it, yet as observations accumulate a shadow researcher emerges. Is Kyria’s knowledge being sought, or the Collector’s? And, other than the symbolic plant, do the other figures exist at all?

Synopsis

Orbiting 3D images of plastics are collaged with hand-processed 16mm film, including scenes from the demolition of the Parkesine factory in Hackney Wick, London, where the first semi-synthetic plastic was invented. Both flickering, contingent materials allude to the history of cellulose nitrate in the development of photography and film.

Synopsis

You might think America is a democracy, where freedom of speech and basic rights are guaranteed. But at its heart, there is a great injustice. Against all the odds several extraordinary citizens are banding together and fighting back for their basic right to clean water. Armed only with facts and their illnesses, they risk arrest to take on the might of industry and government. From Flint to the Navajo Nation, via Standing Rock, this is their story.

Synopsis

What price do the farmers of Punjab pay for the rice on our plate? The north Indian state of Punjab was said to have produced enough food to feed the entire country during the Green Revolution. However, the overuse of chemicals introduced to enhance production poisoned the water with carcinogens and created an infertile soil addicted to chemicals. Just as the land is dependent, so are more and more farmers becoming addicted to drugs, which help them to work longer hours in the fields. The expense of the chemicals and drugs forces farmers to take loans from 'Arthis', the rich middlemen who increase their interest rates without warning. Over 50,000 farmers have committed suicide in the last ten years, by drinking the toxic chemicals that are murdering Punjabi soil.

Synopsis

A dissatisfied and alienated young woman finds momentary purpose when a strange self-help guide comes into her life. Although her life improves, when she unwittingly encounters the author in a pub she is faced with an unsettling realisation.

Synopsis

The story of Diva – a fading superstar preparing for a comeback performance at the 2065 'eSports Olympics' – and Geo, an AI with artistic yearnings. Set in a smoke-and-mirrors realm of fantastical architecture, sentient drones and snow-deluged jungles, AIDOL revolves around the long and complex struggle between humanity and Artificial Intelligence. Fame – in all its allure and emptiness – is set against the bigger contradictions of a post-AI world, a world where originality is sometimes no more than an algorithmic trick and where machines have the capacity for love and suffering. Contemporary anxieties and fixations – the rise of AI, the formulaic dictates of celebrity, the hegemony of technological giants – are refracted through a quixotic prism. AIDOL is accompanied by a score composed and orchestrated by the artist.

Synopsis

Experimental documentary that recounts a town’s revival of an ancient folk tradition, placing it in contrast to today’s digital technologies.

Synopsis

Haruspex is suggestive of dark human secrets. The child makes a spirit guide that turns bad. In adulthood she understands that she is a mammal. She sees with creature’s eyes. The film employs the tropes of the uncanny to evoke a feeling of disquiet. The story is deliberately ambiguous, implicit of something that ought to remain hidden.

Synopsis

Between 2011 and 2015 UK adventurer Sarah Outen traversed the globe. For her expedition London2London: Via The World, Sarah was the engine, travelling by bike, kayak and rowing boat across Europe and Asia, the Pacific Ocean, North America and finally the Atlantic. Sarah’s incredible four-year odyssey saw her travel over 20,000 miles. As she migrated between cultures, climates and landscapes under her own power, Sarah’s inspirational voyage was followed by thousands, hooked on her infectious humour and love of life. But travelling mostly solo, the trip took its toll, and the punishing elements, ticking clock and months of solitude pushed Sarah to the physical and mental brink. Woven out of hundreds of hours of footage from the expedition, Home intimately and unflinchingly captures Sarah’s journey: the kindness of strangers, the wonders of the wild, the savagery of the elements, the near-death experiences, the demons of her emotional trauma and PTSD, and her discovery of love for a farmer called Lucy. Home is a story of heart and soul, of hardship and joy, and one woman’s trek towards true emotional acceptance.