Projects in genres: Drama

Synopsis

An Englishwoman wakes up in the middle of the night in a small hotel in a poverty-stricken foreign city where a civil war is being fought. She has a fever, and tries to remember why she has returned to this frightening country.

During the night, she starts to retrace her happy childhood and her relatively happy adult existence as a kind, hard-working professional woman who loved her family and friends, appreciated music and the arts. But she is also retracing the unusual events that have led her to this place, and how the people she has met on that journey began to change her understanding of the world. Now, in this lonely hotel room she is struggling with a new and unpleasant perception of herself and her life.

As the dawn breaks, her fever subsides and with it comes an honest appraisal of herself. With gut-wrenching clarity she has come to understand her responsibility for the violence of poverty and exploitation she sees in the world.

Synopsis

Love. Loneliness. London.

Sacha is the favourite young gigolo of the over-50s of Mayfair and Piccadilly. His clients are wealthy, successful - and pay for sex. Behind the closed doors of late-night London, he works to give pleasure to lonely women. His clients savour one night of male attention; Sacha finds comfort in the darkness.

At dawn, Trevor (the valet) starts work. He collects the dry cleaning, sources clients, books hotel rooms. He takes pride in a job well done.
Across town, Sacha leaves a hotel room, his client sleeping and satisfied. He drives home to Trevor in the early morning light, loneliness creeping over him like a fever.

With Anna Massey, Sian Phillips and Susannah York playing the clients, The Gigolos provokes, stimulates and arouses. With absolute discretion guaranteed.
 

Synopsis

In 1938 two producers hire hell-raising Hollywood star Leslie Grangely (Ewan McGregor) to play Bonnie Prince Charlie (also McGregor) in a movie about the 18th-century Jacobite Rebellion in Scotland. Soon after, a drunk Grangely disappears and the producers are forced to find a replacment. They trick a gullible, goofy extra with an uncanny resemblance for Grangely into playing the role of Bonnie Prince Charlie, 'The Great Pretender'.

A hilarious comedy and a paradox of epic proportions, The Great Pretender reconfirms Ewan McGregor's deft comic genius as he stars, doubles and extras in this riotous role-switching farce of a movie within a movie.

Synopsis

Based on Alan Bennett's hit National Theatre comedy-drama. An unruly bunch of bright, funny sixth-form boys in 1980s Yorkshire are in pursuit of sex, sport and a place at Oxford or Cambridge. A maverick English teacher, a facts-orientated history teacher and a young and shrewd supply teacher are trying to help them, albeit with completely different teaching methods. The school is run by a slightly crazed headmaster obsessed with results and getting his school up the league tables. Given all this, can the boys achieve their Oxbridge goal and what can they learn about life, love, history, and film-endings along the way?

Synopsis

Set in the mid-1970s The Illiterate is the story of Fidel, a young boy growing up in a hippy commune who suffers from acute dyslexia. Alienated from school and his abusive teachers Fidel retreats into his own dark and violent fantasy world. Only when a woman living in the commune takes on the job of teaching him to read does Fidel's life begin to change and a whole new world of possibilities begin to open up.

Synopsis

The Jigsaw of Life is an emotional thriller, exploring love, friendship, betrayal, anger, vengeance and enlightenment. The film is set over the course of Duncan's life. His childhood is shown from the arrival of his stepfather, Michael. Duncan's mother, Faye, inadvertently allows them to get trapped in a suffocating atmosphere that slowly poisons them. We see how the young Duncan deals with the situation at home and how it changes him and shapes him for later life. Duncan then moves away to university, where he experiences happiness for the first time, and falls in love with Clara. A close betrayal by his so-called friend, Keith, then starts a chain reaction that leads to him quitting university and losing all direction. Duncan has made a great friend at university, Lee, who sticks with him through thick and thin, as Duncan tries to find some understanding and reasoning in the world. He then meets Pete, who suggests the concept of the jigsaw of life, and this helps Duncan move on and look to the future. Duncan eventually comes face to face with Keith again, and their ultimate confrontation sparks the final climactic scenes.

Synopsis

The setting is Lancashire in 1932. Albert Pierrepoint, in his early 30s, a local delivery truck driver, arrives home one day to a letter sent to him ‘On Her Majesty's Service'. He has been accepted for training at Pentonville Prison, to honour the Pierrepoint name and become a British executioner, following in the footsteps of both his father and uncle. Despite his proud excitement, his mother Mary disapproves and tells him exactly what she told his father; she never wants to hear, see, nor speak of it.

The opportunity is a dream come true for Albert and he makes the trip to London. The journey marks the beginning of the incredible career of the world's most famous executioner, who will one day officiate at the hangings of some of Britain's most notorious murderers including John George Haigh, the acid bath murderer, and Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain.

Synopsis

In an incredible twist of fate, a Scottish doctor (James McAvoy) on a Ugandan medical mission becomes irreversibly entangled with one of the world’s most barbaric figures: Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker). Impressed by Dr. Garrigan’s brazen attitude in a moment of crisis, the newly self-appointed Ugandan President Amin hand picks him as his personal physician and closest confidante. Though Garrigan is at first flattered and fascinated by his new position, he soon awakens to Amin’s savagery - and his own complicity in it. Horror and betrayal ensue as Garrigan tries to right his wrongs and escape Uganda alive.

Synopsis

When Martha's boyfriend Alex dies after an argument, she's left grief-stricken and pondering whether, if they'd started afresh, the relationship could have worked out differently. A few days later, she's woken from a deep sleep by a late-night television documentary and gets the chance to find out the answer to that very question.

Synopsis

The Lives of the Saints is a dark and bizarre morality tale.

The story unfolds in the cafés, clubs and shops of Green Lanes, where Mr Karva is the boss: a ridiculous yet dangerous man. Othello, his stepson, is the young pretender, palling around with his girlfriend Tina and his weak-willed lackey Emilio. Life revolves around socialising, gambling and trying to scrape a modest living.

But that lifestyle is about to be thrown into disarray by an otherworldly, sickly-looking 10-year- old child. Mr Karva's errand boy, Roadrunner, stumbles across the child in the park and offloads the bizarre find into Othello's basement.

Thus begins an exhilaratingly strange series of events. It seems that the child is able to grant others their innermost desires... Soon Othello's dreams of limitless wealth are becoming reality. And true to form, his tyrannical stepfather wants to muscle in on the action.

It's Paradise on the streets of north London, but family ties and relationships are becoming increasingly strained and as Mr Karva himself says, 'every Paradise got its serpent'. He persuades the unstable Emilio to take the matter into his own hands, and the tale plummets towards its tragic conclusion.

The Lives of the Saints is a truly original, modern-day fable, which warns that what we wish for is not always what we need.

Synopsis

The story of English medieval King Richard III from cradle to death, seen from a psychodynamic and mythological perspective.

Synopsis

In the magical spirit of Chocolat and Like Water for Chocolate comes The Mistress of Spices, a romantic tale of food and love from the team that brought you Bend it Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice.