Projects in genres: Drama

Synopsis

A story of the life, struggle and survival of London's East End landlady, Sandra Esqulant, who's been running the Golden Heart pub in Spitalfields for nearly 30 years. Adored by everyone around her, the film captures a slice of her life in one of the most fascinating areas in London.

Synopsis

As Alison waits for her lunchtime appointment, a familiar figure enters the restaurant - it's Laura, her first love. Without warning, Laura drops a bombshell: she still loves Alison and wants her back. Before Alison can catch her breath, Sara, her girlfriend, rushes into the restaurant and wonders how Alison knows Laura, her mother.

She has a choice. Does Alison make the right one?

Synopsis

Marina is a forty-something Russian woman living in a small village in South Leicestershire, England. Seven years ago she married Gregory, a village garage owner, collector of Morris Minor cars and Ipswich Town supporter. They met when Gregory went to seem them play against Torpedo Moscow. Marina moved to England with her five year old daughter in the hope of happiness and a secure future for her child.

A journalist and a writer in her previous life, she now works as a local hairdresser and in her spare time writes for the parish magazine. Gregory loves her, and her daughter seems to flourish in a private school, but Marina isn't satisfied with her life, but can't really explain why.

The feeling increases when she meets Valentina, an old friend from Moscow. She is a successful writer and Marina asks herself whether maybe she could also write books in Russian, her native language which nobody seems to need in England.

A chance encounter with a touring string quartet from Moscow throws her out of her daily routine, and unexpected love opens up all the questions which Marina has been hiding deep inside.

It's a story about love and about people who are moving from place to place in search of home, but can't find it anywhere. It's also a story about middle age - the age when one has already (or not) achieved something in life, but when there is still time to start everything anew. And it's a story about a Standing Stone on the outskirts of a small English village where, some of the villagers believe, aliens might land one day.
 
For this film, Marina Blake won Best Actress at Kinoshock 2008. In addition, the film won awards for Outstanding Achievement, with particular reference to direction, screenplay and cinematography, and for Best Actress, at the Faithful Heart Film Festival, Moscow, in October 2008.

Synopsis

On a night amongst friends, Pete and Suzy await the arrival of Pete’s fiancée Kim, but as the delays mount, the origins of her mysterious texts become ever more unclear.

Synopsis

Seeing Smoke is a cautionary tale about a man falsely accused of child molestation, and the effect this has on his life and those around him.

Synopsis

A west bound, no-place comprised of flyovers, slip roads and cracked concrete.

Here thirty year old Marvin is stuck in a teenager’s life: working in motorway services, spending his evenings in abandoned, overgrown fields - watching the light change, apparently biding his time.

Traffic rushes through, trippers stopping only for fuel and food. Rural life has been abandoned. Villages sprawl into deadend suburbs. Only Roland has been here as long as Marvin, relentlessly talking of leaving, never doing it, aggravating the still confidence of Marvin’s moments.

When the catalyst for change arrives it does so in the strangest form, that of a foul-mouthed foreign adolescent. She appears in Marvin’s abandoned field to practise her extraordinary act, and this image of a tiny, runtish girl, hovering an inch above the long thistles, sets Marvin into a spin. Everything changes.

As he fights to help her, something finally changes in Marvin.; something that could take him anywhere.

September conjures a world of mesmerizing skies, failures, jealousy, hopes, outsiders and motorway roars to painting original cinematic landscape. Cars race below, leaving Marvin on the bridge, we trundle down the motorway, light intermittently hitting the windscreen through the trees, and the film flutters out of existence to leave its audience, like Marvin, strangely altered.

Financed by the UK Film Council, the film stars (Nicholas Aaron) as boy/man Marvin, and (Tim Plester) plays Roland. Produced by Met Films, September is a long short, mashing HD and 16mm, with music from Kaada, Crescent, Bass Clef and Tom Bugs. Writer/director Esther May Campbell picked up the Best British Film Award at Encounters 2008.

Synopsis

Hannah lives alone in a large, remote house on England’s north Norfolk coast, where little has changed in fifty years - the marshes, the sand dunes, the pine forests, the long empty beaches and solitary houses under wide, open skies. She and her late husband bought the house after a life filled with theatre, books and travel. She seems perfectly happy with her poetry, her garden and her much younger friend, Joe, a handsome, mysterious young loner who brings her cannabis to ease the pain of a long illness.

When Hannah’s son, Robert arrives with Kate and Sam, his teenage daughter and ten-year-old son, tensions quickly surface. Robert is troubled by Hannah’s intimacy with Joe and is deeply suspicious of his motives, while Kate finds him extremely attractive. Sam, in between, excitedly exploring the nearby ship wreck and roaming the countryside, learns about jealousy and loss.

Robert endeavors to assert his place over Joe and take control of his mother’s life. But ultimately it is through Joe that he comes to understand the people and things in his life that really matter.

Synopsis

During 2008, Superkrush Films worked with a group of young ex-offenders to create a short film dealing with the negative consequences of knife crime.

An innovative and original project, Shank, shows how engaging young disaffected people in the media can not only assist them in integrating back into the community, but inform the lm industry with honesty, originality and innovation in story-telling.

Fresh off the prison block and back on the streets, Brody is determined to set his life straight. Tired of the troubled streets he knows, he offers his time to assist a former youth councillor working with kids on the edge of the system. But what begins as an opportunity to change someone else’s life soon threatens to destroy his own. With long term girlfriend Lisa on one side and the savage gang leader Lewis hungry for blood on the other, Brody is caught between the path he wants to walk, and the streets he can’t avoid.

Synopsis

Worlds collide as the lives of Cal and Olivier intersect in SHANK, a gritty coming of age/rites of passage drama.
Cal, an 18-year-old Scally lad and gang member has nothing in his life except drugs, sex, random acts of violence and a secret that he keeps hidden from his mates. An online hook up for sex with a stranger, Scott (36), temporarily satisfies but fails to dampen his unspoken desires for his best mate, Jonno. Nessa, their twisted, foul-mouthed and controlling, de facto gang leader, suspects that there is something going on between them but she can't put her finger on it. Jonno, putty in Nessa'a hands, can't express his own deep rooted and unrequited attachment to Cal. Manipulating situations that bring her closer to having her suspicions confirmed, Nessa sets out about dividing loyalties and encouraging conflict.

Synopsis

On a baking hot day, twenty-something Angela has told Harry she's leaving him for another man. As Angela folds into a suitcase the one thing she's taking from the shipwreck of their relationship - the wedding dress she never got to wear - Harry appears obsessed by just one point: the name of her new lover. While Harry probes and goads her, the flow of the narrative is interrupted by disturbing fractured images of blood gushing from a slashed throat. Finally Angela snaps. She flings a bottle of beer at Harry, missing him and smashing a full-length mirror on the wall. They watch in awe as their reflected image shatters into dozens of jagged, murderous shards - The drama has just begun.

Synopsis

She, A Chinese tells the story of, a young Chinese woman, MEI, who leaves her monotonous village life behind for the excitement of the nearest big city, Chongqing. However, life there doesn't quite turn out as she expected it; fired from her factory job, she falls in love with SPIKEY, a hit man whose own past soon catches up with him.  A spur of the moment decision takes Mei to London, where she marries an elderly man, MR HUNT.  A new life begins for Mei, trapped in the silence of Mr Hunt's house, alienated and bored. Her frustration at life with Mr Hunt leads Mei into an affair with RACHID, an Indian immigrant who runs a local take away restaurant, and she moves into the backroom of the restaurant to live with him.  Rachid decides to return to his own country, leaving Mei pregnant and alone, facing an uncertain future.

Synopsis

Shoot On Sight, is a gripping thriller and riveting family drama that unfolds the turmoil in the life of Tariq Ali, a Muslim police officer at Scotland Yard.

Commander Ali, born in Pakistan, married to an English woman, and with two teenage kids, is tasked to investigate the police shooting of a suspected Muslim terrorist on the London Underground. Distrusted by both his British superiors in the London police, and his fellow Muslims, he finds his inquiry hampered from all sides. When evidence surfaces pointing to the slain man's innocence, as well as the existence of a terrorist cell operating in his own backyard, Tariq must face the realization that sometimes, the right decision is the hardest one to make. The film is inspired by the terrorists’ attacks of July 7, 2005 on the London underground that resulted in Shoot On Sight order.