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.
Flying Blind is a passionate post-9/11 love story that confronts cultural, racial and sexual taboos. It tells the story of an impossible love: an older woman with a younger man, in a world where security is paramount and nothing is quite what it seems.
Frankie works for a major aerospace manufacturer, designing drones for the military. She’s at the top of her game and in total control of her life. When she meets Kahil, a French-Algerian student, much younger than her, she embarks on a passionate affair and for the first time in her life she utterly, thrillingly, loses control. One morning, when she arrives for work, she’s detained by security and told that Kahil is a person of interest to the security services. She discovers that she has unwittingly crossed a line from control and security, into a nightmare world of suspicion and accusation. She now realises how little she knows of this man. But her love for him proves stronger than her mistrust, and she tries to find a way to protect her lover. Finally she discovers to her cost that betrayal always comes from those closest to us.
Martin's first experience of life was rather positive. He was swimming with thousands of similar sperms towards the warmly inviting egg. Reached it, Martin was the winner, the quickest one of all.
Was it determination or beginners luck?
A lonely little girl who yearns for somebody to talk to begins to confide in the moon from her bedroom window each night. However, when a cloudy evening obscures her view, she ventures out into the garden to find her skyward friend.
In a not too distant yet boiling hot future, a husband can't bring himself to express his affection for his wife. Thankfully, the right consumer product has become available in the nick of time. But is another energy-consuming device really the answer to a rapidly changing climate?
