Projects with status: Complete

Synopsis

A geographic description of fourteen months of the work and non-work of Tayoko in the mountains of Kyoto Prefecture, Japan. A georgic in five books.
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2020 - Encounters - World premiere

Synopsis

Stephanie, a woman in her mid-thirties, is trying to overcome chronic anorexia in order to re-establish her relationship with her daughter, Pearl. Pearl now lives with Stephanie's mother, Susan, and her fiancee Annette. The burden of Stephanie's illness puts pressure on their relationship, with Pearl angry at her mother but also hopeful that Stephanie is getting better. Stephanie is also challenged by a tension quietly simmering between herself and Susan, while attempts to find solace in a relationship with her nurse, Shaun, invite more turmoil.
BODY OF WATER explores how women self-identify in a world that presents us with constantly conflicting perceptions of what it is to be female. It examines the destructive nature of eating disorders and body dysmorphia within a narrative film framework.

Synopsis

Isabel is a tee-girl. She spends the whole day sitting on a stool barely one foot above the dirt-ground teeing up golf balls for golfers to hit as they practice swinging their steel clubs just inches away from Isabel's face.
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2020 - Berlinale Shorts - World premiere

Synopsis

INFINITY MINUS INFINITY draws on several inspirations: the modernist verse of the Jamaican poet Una Marson, the alluvial invocations of the Martiniquan philosopher and poet Edouard Glissant, the black feminist poetics of the Brazilian philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva and the racial formation of geology theorised by British geographer Kathryn Yusoff to dramatise an audio-visual experiment in choreo-poetics.
INFINITY MINUS INFINITY brings together dance, music, recital and digital animation to compose a transhistorical zone in which the unpayable debts of racial capitalism cannot be separated from the ongoing crimes of capitalogenic climate catastrophe. Infinity minus Infinity enacts the durational timelines of past distress, present duress and future dread through the assembly of a chorus of trans-temporal deities whose utterances, expressions, gestures and movements personify the compounded, accumulated, irreparable times and spaces of the hostile environment.
The phrase ‘hostile environment’ invokes the covert policy of targeting migrants enacted by the Conservative government since 2014. It stands for the criminalisation of the Afro-Caribbean women and men that migrated to Britain in the 1950s to help reconstruct its industrial infrastructure. The effort to detain and deport these women and men of the Windrush generation – so called because they followed in the wake of the men that emigrated to Britain from the Caribbean on board the SS Empire Windrush in 1948 – reveals the British state’s commitment to disarticulating the forms of attachment and belonging of Afro-Caribbean settlement that helped decolonize the British empire from within.
Infinity minus Infinity extends the policy of the ongoing hostile environment backward and forward in an inter-scalar movement between times and spaces that dramatises Saidiya V. Hartman’s formulation of the afterlife of slavery within a choreography of what Christina Sharpe calls anti-blackness as total climate. (RCA)
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2020 - Forum Expanded - International premiere

Synopsis

Three-time Academy Award® nominee Johnny Depp plays celebrated war photographer W. Eugene Smith in a real life David vs Goliath story, pitting Smith against a powerful corporation responsible for poisoning the people of Minamata, Japan in 1971.
New York, 1971. W. Eugene Smith (Johnny Depp) is a celebrated photo-journalist and photo-essayist, but he feels devoid of inspiration. He is at such a low ebb he even considers suicide. Then a Japanese-American woman Aileen (Minami) shows up to convince him to come to the Japanese coastal city of Minamata, whose community has been ravaged by mercury poisoning, the result of decades of gross industrial negligence by Japan’s Chisso Corporation.
Eugene eventually agrees to go, with the reluctant and secret support of Life Magazine head Robert Hayes (Bill Nighy). With Aileen, Smith immerses himself in the community, documenting the people’s efforts to live with Minamata Disease and their passionate fight to achieve recognition and compensation from Chisso. It is a life-changing experience — one which brings Eugene redemption, love, new purpose and his greatest-ever photograph. A photograph that will change the world and provide desperately needed fuel to the fledgling environmental protection movement.
'Minamata' is a moving redemptive story of how one man’s powerful photograph impacted the world, yet in order to find it he had to open his heart.
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2020 - Berlinale Special - World premiere

Synopsis

A British Pakistani rapper is on the cusp of his first world tour, but is struck down by an illness that threatens to derail his big break.
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2020 - Panorama - World premiere

Synopsis

Forensic Architecture meticulously reconstruct an accident involving a boat full of migrants close to the European coast. The work is based on video material recorded by artist and survivor Amel Alzakout as the boat was sinking.
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2020 - Forum Expanded - World premiere

Synopsis

The Outer Hebrides was long ago once thought of as a place of seers, who were known to have the gift of Second Sight: an ability to foretell future events. These prognostications were revealed to the seer in the form of visions or otherworldly sounds. Sometimes they took the form of portents derived by augury read from animals, bones, or weather patterns foretelling what has yet come to pass.
Using these stories as a starting point, THE TWO SIGHTS, is a portrait of a rapidly changing maritime environment with its acoustic ecology and culture in flux in a time of uncertain futures.
Long take Super 16mm cinematography, interwoven with site-specific field recordings and interviews collected from the disappearing oral histories of several Hebridean communities are collaged to explore the relationship between place narrative, environment, and the reciprocal influences they exact upon one another.
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2020 - Forum - World premiere

Synopsis

Moving from the frozen landscapes of the Jura mountains to the urban centres of Port-au-Prince, Ouvertures brings the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture back to life. In France a Haitian researcher tries to read the past within the stratigraphic layers of Jurassic limestone, whilst in Haiti a group of young actors translate and rehearse scenes from 'Monsieur Toussaint', a play written by Édouard Glissant, that recounts the last days in the life of Louverture dying in exile in a prison cell in the Jura, 1803. Ghosts from the pantheon of Haitian history visit Louverture on his deathbed and put him to trial. As the play proceeds the actors become possessed by their characters, and eventually the ghost of Louverture joins the group and takes them on a voyage for a new kind of exile.
Official Selection Berlinale 2020 - Forum - World premiere

Synopsis

On his wedding anniversary, Yusef and his young daughter set out in the West Bank to buy his wife a gift. Between soldiers, segregated roads and checkpoints, how easy is it to go shopping?
BAFTA Film Awards 2021 - Winner - Best British Short Film
Academy Awards 2021 - Nomination - Best Short Film (Live Action)

Synopsis

The title is borrowed from a recent book which discusses the effect of the use of the internet on peoples emotions i.e. body image, general existential issues etc . I consider the work in terms of assemblage as currently understood in contemporary philosophy and literature. (Richard O'Callaghan)

Synopsis

When flat earth activist Fawn takes her alternative beliefs offline and onto the streets, frustration and rejection lead her to wrestle with her newfound ideology.