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
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?
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.
A woman, tormented to the point of madness by her lust for a man she works with, visits a Shawafa, a Moroccan witch, to find a cure. Has this man cast a spell on her, is she possessed by a bad jinn? Whatever it is, the woman, the Shawafa and her maid find their lives totally transformed by its presence.
The tragic story of an American music virtuoso who found in 1970s Iran the love and acceptance he never received back home, and who was punished by his country upon his return after the Iranian revolution.
Over images of a young boy playing the accordion in a home movie from 1940’s America, a radio host comments on the trial that was to ruin Lloyd Miller´s life decades later in the Eighties – for charges he was innocent of.
The images of the young boy are quickly replaced with images of an Iranian TV show from the 1970’s, where a sharply dressed man named Kurosh Ali Khan is being interviewed in Farsi about his musical creation, Oriental Jazz. Music kicks in, and now we see the man presented in a video, much younger, playing the santur, a Persian instrument, accompanied by jazz. A voice begins to narrate, in the third person, the story of Kurosh, an American man who is forced by political circumstances to leave the country he’s considered his only real home for seven years. He is on his way back to America, leaving his life as a famous TV host behind him.
An intimate portrait of Hobbit and Jake, who have decided to raise their one-year-old child Anoush gender open. The family lives on a houseboat in the UK and in order to prevent people from making gender-related assumptions, they are keeping the biological sex of their baby a secret.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Debate Strand
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.
Artist, activist and performer Jess Thom, who has Tourette's syndrome, conducts a revealing investigation into one of Beckett’s most intense monologues, ‘Not I’, in which she asks the audience to reconsider issues of disability, representation and social exclusion.
This film is radical in its asking of exciting and novel questions about the portrayal of disability in the arts and the exclusion of disabled people as cultural and creative producers. Jess moves past the reverence that surrounds Beckett’s work and makes it accessible to everyone, while raising questions about cultural curation, who has access to theatre and who can perform it.
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.
![PHX [X is for Xylonite]](/storage/project/images/films/2019/12/PHX_filmstill_11_1564948514609_00ecf85c00_thumb.jpg)
