In Search of Silent Landscapes follows Britain’s top female ultra-distance runner, Sharon Gayter. We learn of her troubled childhood, desire for escape and the hours of pain and solitude that redeemed her.
The film is a portrait of a complex and remarkable woman and a meditation on time, devotion and silence.
Filmed over four years, Personal Best follows up-and-coming British sprinters on their journey from the grassroots of athletics to the international stage. The film is both a gripping portrait of the athletes in training and competition, and a deeply personal account of their lives unfolding – revealing victory, defeat, agony, ecstasy and the simple trials of growing up. On the eve of the 2012 Olympics, this film tells the stories of Britain’s young sprinters as they strive towards their dreams. This is an inspiring but genuine portrait of Britain’s youth and a penetrating study of the art of sprinting, peeling back the layers so we can finally understand everything it means to them as they are on the start-line waiting for the gun to fire.
Desperate not to be like his father, a young boxer must fight everything he knows to stop history repeating.
Clayton Murdoch carries a terrible darkness inside him: as a boy he was exposed by his brutal father to violence, domestic abuse, gang culture and ultimately murder. Years later and with his father now in prison, Clayton struggles to overcome his past. In a city where every day there is a constant threat of violence and death, he keeps his sanity by channelling his aggression into boxing, the one part of his life where he feels powerful, in control, contained.
However, when the violence that surrounds him starts to destroy his own family, Clayton’s inner darkness is unleashed. And now, to gain vengeance against those who have taken his loved ones, he must ask the one man he fears the most for help: his father. With everything around him falling apart and the full shocking fury in him let loose, Clayton must look death in the face and find out who is the man inside.
Pensioners from across the planet compete in the over-80s World Table Tennis Championships in Inner Mongolia. The film weaves a competition narrative with candid portraits of life back home that explore the hope, regret and immediacy of growing old.
8 players with 703 years between them guide us through the extraordinary world of Veteran sports. 81-year old Englishman Terry, recovering from life-threatening cancer, battles to retain his gold medal title. At 99, Australian legend Dorothy de Low creates a sensation as the oldest competitor at the Championships. German newcomer Inge, aged 89, has fought her way out of a dementia ward using the power of ping pong. This film is as much about the tenacity of the human spirit as it is a meditation on mortality.
Right now 1 in 6 people on the planet are over the age of 60. By 2030 that figure will be 1 in every 4. From the outset the film challenges perceptions of what it is to grow old. With humour and sensitivity it engages with the issues we all face in an ageing global population.
An up-beat comic extravaganza involving the family of
a football obsessed grandfather, a women's fitness centre manager and
mother, a dodgy car dealer and twin daughters lifeguards.
This short film tells the story of Ash, a mixed-race girl from Old Trafford, Manchester, UK. On a youth referral scheme, we see Ash travel to the iconic Salford Lads Club where she takes up boxing as a way of dealing with her troubled past. By portraying Ash’s experience of the sport, the film highlights how the boxing ring can be a neutral space where race and neighborhood politics are left outside.
The film looks at not only Ash’s own experience of racism, but also the preconceptions she and others hold about other people and places.
Clench demonstrates how boxing can become the ultimate visual tool for communication between generations, highlighting that every person has a story to tell regardless of how they look.
Towards the end of the second world war Dr Ludwig Guttmann, a brisk refugee from Nazi Germany, arrives at Stoke Mandeville hospital in Buckinghamshire and is appalled to find the partially paralysed spinal patients heavily sedated and left to rot with bed sores. He immediately begins a new regime,disposing of old equipment and sedatives, bringing him into conflict with stern Sister Edwards and pompous consultant Cowan, as well as the patients. However the sister backs him when she realises he is treating her charges as people, not patients, talking to them and involving them in musical entertainments and sporting activity. Soon Whitehall are sending him all their spinal patients and, with visits to the pub and wheelchair sports taught by an army sergeant, he becomes the men's hero. With the war over Ludwig organizes national wheelchair sports competitions which will in turn lead to the establishment of the Paralympic games. An end title informs that in 1966, now a British citizen, Dr Guttmann was deservedly knighted for his part in bringing hope to the hopeless.
A poetic journey through the waterways and along the coastline of the British Isles, following a lone swimmer through lakes, rivers and coves, framed by a soundtrack of seminal British music from Delius to The La's.
Town of Runners is a feature documentary made by award winning director Jerry Rothwell about young people from the Ethiopian rural town of Bekoji, home to the current Olympic and World champions Tirunesh Dibaba and Kenenisa Bekele.
The film follows three children keen to follow in their heroes’ footsteps, as they move from school track to national competition and from childhood to adulthood.
Set against the background of the seasonal rhythms of this farming region, and the impact of increased urbanization, climate change and globalization on agriculture, the film shows rural young Africans striving to make their own future.
A teenager on the path to self-destruction finds unlikely inspiration in a troupe of ballerinas, a skateboarder, a graffiti artist, free runners and battling MCs.
The Bedlamites are a group of fell runners who organise races up some of the most well-known and beautiful peaks in and around Yorkshire, UK. But these runners don't meet on a clear sunny day at the weekend or on a summer's evening. These races are run in winter, sometimes through thick fog and rain, on grassy, uneven and slippery terrain and during the night.
Under the cover of darkness they meet to race up and down the Fells using only torches to guide them over the harsh terrain in severe weather conditions.
Through this film we hope to transport the audience into this black and white world of nighttime, off-road running where moonlight and a chilly wind reveal the landscape in a very different way; where the snaking of lights up hillsides provide a luminous spectacle and where the narrow spread of the torchlight gives each runner a focus to drive them on up the hill.
