Projects in genres: Comedy

Synopsis

Anthrakitis tells the story of Dolly, an elderly widow, who has been hoarding coal since the deaths of her husband and son years ago in mining accidents. When Dolly realises that everyone in the village wants a bit of her fifty foot high coal mountain, including her home help, Winny, Dolly is forced to take drastic measures . . .

Synopsis

A woman makes bread in her kitchen. The bread dough, through the care it is given and vigorous kneading, grows into a huge blob. Somehow, the blob gets into her bed. The film steps from the kitchen and bedroom experiences to make a fast, rhythmic, humorous and poignant film.

Synopsis

Desserts is a black and humorous tale about the supernatural results of a man's greed. It is possibly the shortest film ever made about revenge.

Synopsis

Set in Salford in 1970, East is East is a fast moving comedy of mixed-race manners. It centres on the Anglo-Pakistani alliance of the Khan family that is both claustrophobically cohesive and desperately dysfunctional. In their cramped Salford terrace house, daily anarchy erupts with farcical energy. The Khan children, being caught between bell-bottoms and arranged marriages, scoff surreptitious rashers of bacon as they are buffeted this way and that by their father's insistence on tradition, their English mother's laissez-faire, and their own wish to be citizens of the modern world.


Based on the award-winning stage play by Ayub Khan-Din, East is East was originally produced by the Royal Court Theatre, revived due to critical acclaim at the Theatre Royal in Stratford East 1997.

Synopsis

For drunk towny mates Rich and Paul it's been a grim old Friday night on the pulling girls front. Paul's off home and Rich wants the chicken tikka masala, only there's bad news: his wages haven't cleared. And when your wages haven't cleared, trying to stuff your face can be dicey . . .

Synopsis

At the wake of an actor who has died in sudden and unexpected circumstances, a group of friends gather around the grieving Sadie only to find themselves being filmed to conclude a movie the deceased had been working on in the months leading up to his death. To help them understand why she wishes to complete the film, Sadie shows the group earlier footage in which they've been filmed unaware by video cameras hidden around the house (in living rooms, bedrooms and toilet!) at dinners, parties and so on. The footage of the friends, interspersed with Jude's own to-camera sequences (commenting on what they are watching) turns out to be shocking and often explicit recordings of personal conversations, drug taking and sexual encounters. As a result the wake increasingly descends into an absurdly comic, recriminatory and violent debacle as the group confront each other over the truths revealed on video. Final Cut is a wildly outrageous, extremely funny 'false' documentary partially filmed on video, where the actors use their own names and play fictionalised versions of their real personalities. Guaranteed to offend some and intrigue others,Final Cut is an ambitious and entertaining low budget film featuring some of the cream of young British acting talent.

Synopsis

In his private battle with insomnia and the elements, Harry's paranoid mind begins to play cruel and vivid tricks. A chaotic tale of noise and neurosis and it's deadly consequences.

Synopsis

She has dreams of reading the news on Iranian television. She is fascinated by bollards. She has an agoraphobic mother. She is incapable of doing anything normally. She goes to London to work as a temp and ends up involved in industrial espionage. She brings a company to its knees and then saves it from destruction. Janice Beard: Genius or idiot?

Synopsis

Every woman wants to be wanted . . . just not by the entire Metropolitan Police Force.


Maddy's first day out with her newborn takes a Kafkaesque turn when she's arrested in Harrods for shoplifting. If this is a miscarriage of justice, then detaining her in Holloway Prison's Mother and Baby Unit is the pits. Panicked at the thought of enforced adoption, she smuggles Jack to freedom in her friend Gillian's handbag - a woman with the maternal instincts of a guppy fish.


Finding herself a runner-up in the Human Race, the only person Maddy can turn to is her hot-to-trot ex-lover Alex . . . who proves himself as useful as a solar-powered vibrator on a rainy day. The trouble with Alex is his sex appeal - he gives generously.


Will Maddy ever escape the evil clutches of Edwina Phelps, prison psychotherapist? With the emphasis on physcho. Will she ever see Alex for what he is: a self-made man . . . who worships his creator? When will Alex realise that a 'paternity suit' is not the latest look in men's wear? How do you brief a lawyer with a heat seeking penis which does not report to mission control? And why the hell is Gillian searching for a sperm happy to get egg all over its face?


There's hard knocks and rude shocks in this devastatingly witty screenplay. You'll split your episiotomy stitches laughing.

Synopsis

Milk is a quirky British Comedy about a family in mourning. The death of an 81 year old woman sets the scene for this tale about family funerals and the difficulty of burying one's mother. Or not to bury her, as the case may be.

Adrian is an unmarried, unworldly and somewhat unstable dairy farmer, who hasn't had life work out the way he wanted. Despite the ambitions of his youth, he still finds himself at home, slopping after the dairy cows, still waiting for the lightning that never came. His cosmopolitan mother, Lucy, needed looking after in her self-enforced, bed-ridden seclusion - and the dairy farm needed a man. Until the morning she woke up dead!

Set in the Wiltshire countryside, the action begins when Adrian discovers Lucy's body and ends with its offbeat disposal 48 hours later. In the meantime, Adrian's extended family piles into the dilapidated farmhouse to mourn her passing and to scramble over her loot.

Much of the comedy springs from the intense selfishness that often overcomes people at such times, as if the dead person's love can be sequestered like property, as if Lucy's love could be possessed as easily as her favourite painting.

Upon finding his mother dead, Adrian executes her pet parrot and confiscates her precious painting. Then Lucy's mourners arrive: her refined and reticent older daughter, Harriet, her clever and neglected younger daughter, Virginia, her elegant and greedy brother, Harry, her elderly and urban lover, John and finally her closest friend Veronica Price.

They all want a piece of Lucy, they all have conflicting plans for her funeral and Adrian intends to confound them all on both counts.

Synopsis

William is the divorced owner of a quiet London bookshop. His life is very simple until, one day, the most famous film star in the World walks into his shop and kisses him. A new romantic comedy from the makers of "Four Weddings and a Funeral".

Synopsis

Paul McGuigan's The Acid House is a surreal triptych adapted by Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh from his collection of short stories. Combining a vicious sense of humour with hard-talking drama, the film reaches into the hearts and minds of the chemical generation, casting a dark and unholy light into the hidden corners of the human psyche. The first film of the trilogy, The Granton Star Cause, is a black comedy of revenge, football and religion. The second, A Soft Touch, is a story of love and betrayal with Johnny as the 'soft touch', who is all too easily manipulated by those around him. The final film is a surreal comic story about marriage, babies and an excess of chemical abuse.