“Born in the hour of India’s freedom. Handcuffed to history.” Midnight’s Children is an epic film from Academy Award-nominated director Deepa Mehta, based on the Booker Prize-winning novel by Salman Rushdie.
At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, as India proclaims independence from Great Britain, two newborn babies are switched by a nurse in a Bombay hospital. Saleem Sinai, the illegitimate son of a poor Hindu woman, and Shiva, the offspring of wealthy Muslims, are fated to live the destiny meant for each other. Their lives become mysteriously intertwined and are inextricably linked to India’s whirlwind journey of triumphs and disasters.
Mystic Fighters will take your breath away with a strong
cinematography based on a character driven narrative and you will
discover the deadly art of stick fighting in Trinidad & Tobago like no one has approached it before.
It takes you into a world beyond preconceptions where the poorest becomes the man of knowledge and the guardian to one of the eldest traditions based on the interaction between man and nature.
Over the past decade, labia surgery has increased by a staggering 500%. Centrefold is a unique animated documentary that takes an innovative and balanced approach to this controversial topic. Created by award-winning filmmaker Ellie Land and funded by the Wellcome Trust, visit www.thecentrefoldproject to find out more and join the debate.
Danielle is Eris; goddess of Strife in the Greek pantheon. She is a foster child, teen mother, victim of violence at home and from the state. This is a portrait of a life currently being lived. This film examines the nature of Strife in 21st century Britain.
Grandmother is a Crab borrows from an earlier digital video, made fifteen years ago, that itself used footage captured from a travel advertisement on television. Black and white, and mirror effects, take the image out of time, giving it both vividness and distance. The music is played in reverse. And the voice-over and under-titles are a poem that re-enters the magic world of a child on a beach.
Unprecedented access to the twentieth century's most revered war photographer. Don McCullin worked for The Sunday Times from 1969 to 1984, at a time where, under the editorship of Harold Evans, the newspaper was widely recognized as being at the cutting-edge of world journalism, with Don as its star photographer. During that period he covered wars and humanitarian disasters on virtually every continent and the prominence given to his photo essays coincided with one of the most remarkable periods in the history of photojournalism.
With extensive input from Sir Harold Evans, McCullin not only explores Don’s life and work, but also how the ethos of journalism changed during his career. Using the Sunday Times as an example, it compares the strictly ‘hands off’ approach of proprietors like Lord Thompson, who took pride in the fact that he did not want commercial considerations to censor his editors’ from printing what they wanted, to how the newspaper’s independent character changed once it was taken over by Rupert Murdoch, and the pursuit of advertising revenue became paramount, and with it, the inevitable obsessed with fashion, status and celebrity.
The silent personal archive of deceased filmmaker Terra Miller is laid out against all that remains of one of Miller’s final pieces, an acerbic audio recording of Isabella Berretta, founder of organisation The Fire Brigade. The youngest member of this organisation, Terra’s brother Jaric, whose movements appear to cross time and space in the archive, becomes the physical narrator to Berretta’s vocal presence, at times in synergy, at others in conflict with each other.
Joyce Brand is 78 and she is a campaigner. From defacing buildings to chaining herself to chairs, Joyce is fearless in facing up to injustice she sees in the world, and wishes more of us were too.
THE SEPARATION LINE exposes a British border shared by hundreds of civilians and members of the Armed Forces. Between 2007 and 2011 the small English market town of Wootton Bassett became the site for the British repatriation ceremonies and during an eighteen-month period between February 2010 and August 2011 all the repatriation ceremonies that passed through the town from 2010 to 2011, including the concluding ceremony in August 2011 were filmed. Filming alternative aspects and perspectives to that of documentaries and regular media coverage, the work shares an experience of the repatriations that has not been presented nationally or internationally.
