Projects in genres: Scottish

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A young girl is told to go and deliver something to her Grandmother who is ill.

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Margaret Mellis’s career has encompassed some of the major movements of 20th Century British art. St. Ives neighbours Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo saw her talent and potential but history has relegated her to the sidelines.   A dedicated abstract painter and superb colourist Margaret produced a unique body of work during her later life in Suffolk. Her true legacy has yet to be fully realised.   Using recordings from Artists’ Lives (British Library Sound Archive) the film is told entirely in Margaret’s own words, with her writings and diary entries read by Susannah York.   Margaret Mellis a life in colour puts Margaret’s work centre place, a visual feast of texture, shape and colour.   Margaret Mellis 1914-2009

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Set in a border town in rural Scotland, Native Son is about a troubled farm labourer struggling with loneliness and the need for human contact.

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A young couple break into an abandoned school. Strangers to one another they struggle to achieve the intimacy they desire.

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In the early afternoon of 8 June 1968, following a funeral mass in St Patrick's Cathedral, New York, the Kennedy family and their guests boarded a train at Penn Station to take the body of Robert F Kennedy, assassinated two days before, back to Washington to bury him next to his brother, John. What had not been anticipated were the thousands of people who lined the route to pay their respects to the Senator and who were captured by the camera of Magnum photographer Paul Fusco, who was on the train. One Thousand Pictures tells the story of that journey and of America at the time through some of the people who were there and in the pictures, which in turn provide an extraordinary portrait of 1960's America.

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Commissioned as part of the 'Bridging the Gap' production scheme, short documentary Pollphail is a startling portrait of imagined futures and a village in limbo.

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When a teenage girl is forced to visit her grandfather she must make a stark choice: his dignity or her own? Saltmark is a touching story about a young girl and her grandfather.

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A poignant tale about a young girl, Seonag, who travels back in time to visit her recently deceased Grandfather.

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This is the story of a rational, sceptical woman, a mother and wife, who does not normally remember her dreams. Until she dreamt her horse was dying. She woke so scared she went outside in the night. She found him dead. The next dream told her she would die herself, when she was 48. The Edge of Dreaming charts every step of that year. The film explores life and death in the context of a warm loving family, whose happiness is increasingly threatened as the dream seems to come true. From the kids' reaction to their horses’ death (they taught the dog a new trick called 'dead dog'), the film mixes humour, science and married life as Amy attempts to understand what is happening to her. Everyone wrestles with the concept of their own mortality, but few so directly confront the subject. When Amy fell seriously ill, as her dream predicted, she went on a search to change that dream, leading her to eminent neuroscientist Mark Solms, and to new understanding of the complexity of our brains. The final confrontation, going back into her dream with the help of a shaman, reveals a surprising twist to the tale.

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Karen's mother used to terrify her with tales of a presence on the dark tenement stair - something you should never look at. Years later Karen reluctantly returns to the house she loathed to find her elderly parents, and finds it facing demolition. But her childhood fear still waits within.

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We see Iraqi kids regularly in our media. Nearly always as part of the war, its victims, its adjuncts. But what about their imaginative lives? Inspired a bit by Night of the Hunter, Northern Irish Mark Cousins went to a small village in the Kurdish North, took a projector, some great movies and 3 small cameras to give to kids. The resulting film is about war, yes, but also about not-war: We hear of a fish called Bery who lives in a magical palace, and about a cow that farts. A child combs a dove's feathers in the gloaming. We meet a boy who 'gives his dreams to the mud'.

Synopsis

The Mapmaker is a short film based on a suicide. It is a series of assumptions after the fact - it is told in still images linked to a third person prose narration. The film explores a hostile environment and makes some vague poetic presumptions on the thought processes of woman as she proceeds to her self termination.