From director Ian David Diaz and producer Julian Boote, who brought you the award-winning cult Brit-Flick, The Killing Zone (Grand Jury Prize, Best Feature, LA International Independent Film Festival 2000), Dead Room is by turns a dark, tense and sometimes bizarrely comic story of the various occupants of innocuously numbered Room No, 2. An otherwise ordinary flat in suburban London, owned by an untrustworthy Nigerian Landlord, No. 2 is a room born bad. You know the kind… bad karma on top of bad décor! It inevitably attracts all the wrong people, and something weird always happens there.
Giving examples of its four latest occupants - a gentle writer being driven to murder by a cruel prankster; an ill-prepared trio of women falling foul of a self-perpetuating chain of evil; a TV journalist following an alien-obsessed, barking mad assassin; and a homeless man's encounter with a crazed Stalker and her victim - the Landlord shows us just how macabre and downright odd the room's history really is.
Set in a bed-sitting London many will find all too familiar, Dead Room follows the grand tradition of Dead of Night, Creepshow, and Twilight Zone The Movie.
Blinded in 1976, Martin Shail now works as a lift operator. This film intimately portrays Martin's experiences since becoming blind and captures his encounters with the various people he meets in his lift.
Michelle is young, bright and attractive, leaving prison with a spring in her step and determined to steer clear of the heroin that led her here. Shaun is getting out after a year, his mother Angela there to greet him and take him home to start anew.
In improvised scenes drawn from their past and present experience, Michelle is tempted by a junkie friend and succumbs to an overdose, while Shaun tries hard with his friend Carl to stay straight. It's only a matter of time before Angela's suspicions are confirmed as they return to drugs and thieving. Michelle continues her fighting descent back into addiction, revealing the defining moments of her life: the death of her mother and her father's effective abandonment of her. Angela discusses with Carl's mother the impact of heroin on their lives and her relationships with other men, recalling the despair that led to her attempted suicide. But it's her love which keeps Shaun going, the love Michelle has lost.
In this powerful, often emotional film, Hollywood-bound film director Paul McGuigan achieves a vibrant modern approach to the kind of creative documentary originated by Robert Flaherty and developed by Humphrey Jennings.
Milan, Italy. 1960. Rosetta Susannah Di Curci the feted colouratura soprano is on the brink of superstardom when doctors diagnose a cancerous polyp on her vocal chords. Rosetta chooses to have surgery but knows she will never perform again.
Forty years later, Rosetta lives as a recluse in a city in the north of England. The spectre of her career failure continues to haunt her.
Into Rosetta's life comes Eddie Banks, owner of a small independent record shop. Eddie fights to maintain his prime-site business against cut-throat competition and corrupt estate agents.
Against the backdrop of their own personal traumas, Eddie helps Rosetta to rediscover her zest for life. In return, she shares her unique personal philosophy with him.
Fearing she will become ill again, Rosetta makes contact with the daughter she gave up for adoption forty years ago.
A drugs-dealer double-crosses and kills a drugs trafficker in the remote West Coast of Scotland. The dealer gets arrested and finds out he was seen by a couple of local people. Sitting on remand facing life imprisonment, with only two unnamed witnesses from the one street hamlet of Bartoun standing between him and freedom he decides to hire a hitman to kill all the potential witnesses.
Outside a rural police station the hitman starts a stopwatch, jumps into his car and sets off down the road. He drives at full speed through the barren country roads until he pulls up in Bartoun. He jumps out of the car and stops the stopwatch. It reads 28 minutes 36 seconds.
At noon the next day the hitman strides down Main Street, pulls out two handguns and starts shooting. Once his intial attack is over he starts his stopwatch, sets 28 minutes 36 seconds, counting down. This is how much time he has to kill everyone in the village before the police can possibly get there. Pandemonium follows within the village as he methodically hunts down his targets and people frantically try to stay alive.
The Veranda is about a young artist, Victor, who tries to find silence in his actions and work. He finds it in dialogues with nature; he becomes obsessed and devotes his life to 'The Gaps', which to him become a mystical separate world that defy comprehension. Diving into this discipline, he loses his wife Josy, his friends and everything else in his life.
The actions Victor performs to find these Gaps are seen worldwide; cleaning sections of desert, or walking a mile and watering the parched land, just to see what happens. He places a tree in ice, cleans shadows on the road laid down by trees, polishes rocks at Whitby, and takes 1000m of string across a huge valley to make a Stringbridge - These performances, actions or Happenings are all to find something 'other'.
We meet Victor before and after his fifteen year quest. After various meetings with Charlie, who comes from the silent world he strives for, Victor has to decide between the faith of his Gaps and his last links to humanity, his sister Mina and his daughter Jo.
Winner - Best Foreign Feature Award, Los Angeles Independent Film Festival 2002.
A totally different take on a short film. Rather than a conventional narrative, this is a collection of vignettes showing how 5 contrasting characters: an ageing lothario; a disillusioned yuppie; a movie-obsessed kid; a tense commuter and an 80 year old distance runner find solace and reassurance in their fantasies.
Interlocking emotional stories about various characters on a housing estate, focusing particularly on a family whose young son's illness has a traumatic effect on his parents' relationship.
Married/Unmarried written originally as a stage play, examines the sexual emotions and infidelity of two twenty-something couples.
Each character interacts with another in a blistering series of 'two-hander' vignettes that examines the effects of love and loss, and dissects their darkest sexuality and desires in frank and explicit scenes.
The structure and pace escalate to a startling climax when inhibitions and morals are discarded, leaving the characters naked from restraint.
Using the vibrancy of London streets and locations as a backdrop, the characters are followed in various interludes - both in musical montage and newly scripted scenes. The work lends itself perfectly to being shot in the film medium, heightening the realism and the suffocating emotions of love.
Filmed, styled and structured in the tradition of the French New Wave studies of morals and manners, and inspired by the naturalistic and improvisational focus of John Cassavettes, Married/Unmarried is a stark exploration of dark sexual swordplay, brutal performance, and unflinching truth.
The story seeks to give some semblance of truth about the initial arrival of Europeans in Africa, which eventually leads to slavery and colonisation. In the advent colonisation in Africa, one woman, Yaa Asantewa, refuses to hand over her land for British rule. She leads a tiny army to wage war against the British. This country was the centre of the slave trade and also had the largest reserve of gold at that time.
The story unfolds in late 1471 when the Portuguese arrived on the West African coast in search of gold to mint coin currencies in Europe. Before their arrival, the Arabs were the main traders who also indulged in human trafficking.
This factual documentary looks at the part various African tribes and Europeans play in slavery and its consequential effect.
When slavery was abolished, colonisation also took over culminating into the scramble for Africa.
When Ali finds out that her boyfriend Mike has been unfaithful she ends their relationship. Now 'free' again she goes clubbing with her best friend but, just as they arrive, she sees Mike entering the club ahead of her. Undeterred, Ali decides to exact revenge by snogging any man she can find right under Mike's nose.
As Ali sets off on her mission to humiliate Mike, we encounter a further 30 characters all in search of a good time in Club le Monde. From Yas and Kelly who never leave the toilets as they gossip about contract killers, kissing cousins and constipation; to Anthony and Patrick, wide-eyed teenagers from the country-side, trying to score drugs and be a hit with the babes; to Mosh, the tough-nut bouncer, struggling with his sexual identity and desire to be a lawyer; to Chas who has pierced his nipples and tonight is determined to go further; to Mr. Sunglasses trying to connect in a very disconnecting kind of way; to three outrageous drag queens Tanita, Davida and Karina who realise they've come to the wrong place; to Danny, the club-owner, who gets fresh with his mate's wife and is about to get caught.
In the holiest city Benares or Varanasi on the sacred River Ganges a 3000 year old way of life is threatened by sewage. One man is uniquely placed to fight back. Veer Bhadra Mishra is a Mahant or Hindu Temple Leader at the heart of this traditional culture but also a skilled engineer and now figurehead in this struggle for survival.
