Nigel is an elderly man living as a recluse, haunted by his past and memory of the family he once had, until an unexpected visitor arrives and disrupts his lonely routine.
Cadence decides to run away during an unwished-for road trip with her mother. Looking through her binoculars she sees something unusual that will lead her to an unexpected meeting with two refugees.
A love letter to a forgotten space.
Tones and textures intersect – noises, light, shadow, forms – extended and expanded, drawing us into this non-place.
"The non-place never exists in pure form; places reconstitute themselves in it; relations are restored and resumed in it".
Marc Augé - Non-Places
In 1928 at the age of eleven, Harry Birrell was given his first cine camera. ‘The greatest toy a child could ever receive’ he would say. His obsession with making movies would span the rest of the 20th century, despite the onset of blindness. In love, war and other adventures Harry recorded everything with a wonderfully cinematic eye on thousands upon thousands of feet of high quality 16mm film.
From commanding a battalion of Ghurkas in the Indian army at the start of the WWII, to dangerous sorties deep behind enemy lines in Burma at its end; from the ballroom dances of his youth in the 1930s to teaching his children to twist in the 1960s: Harry’s entertaining and errant adventures are filmed with the intimacy of home movies but on the scale of 'Lawrence of Arabia'.
Today, his granddaughter Carina, uncovers a lifetime of memories all spliced together in over 400 films, personal diaries (narrated by Richard Madden) and countless photographs that have previously lain undiscovered, along with the many cans of cine film, in rusting metal trunks in a garden shed.
It’s one man’s cinematic vision of the 20th Century and his own personal journey through it.
Schoolboy Alex finds his everyday problems dwarfed by his discovery of the mythical sword Excalibur. Now, with the most powerful sword in history in the hands of the most powerless schoolboy in Britain, Alex and his friends must thwart a medieval villain named Morgana, who is hell-bent on destroying the world.
As much a film project and an experiment in collaboration as it is a set of fragments drawn from a reimagined cosmos. These fragments, sounds, and stories help us convey the experiential moment of entanglement, or rather, they describe an entangled moment prior to separation, what we call “Deep Implicancy”.
One such story we follow is water, both as it phases transitions with and into other matter including life, but also as it combines disparate geographies, bodies of/in water, and four islands within them – Lesvos, Haiti, Marshall Islands, Tiwi.
Through a series of experimental migrations and elemental crossings we begin to question the form of the universal human, its calcified and exceptional origins, and in particular its ethical program. Wandering and wondering through a transformative figuring of justice, we ask, what if our image of the world recalled phase instead of measure? And what becomes of ethics if we let go of value? (Arjuna Neuman, Denise Ferreira da Silva)
Official Selection Berlinale 2019 - Forum Expanded Exhibition - Group Exhibition at Betonhalle - World premiere
Writer and musician PJ Harvey and award-winning photographer Seamus Murphy hatched a collaboration - seeking first-hand experience of the countries she wanted to write about, Harvey accompanied Murphy on some of his worldwide reporting trips, joining him in Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Washington DC. Harvey collected words, Murphy collected images.
Back home, the words become poems, songs, then an album, which is recorded in an unprecedented art experiment in Somerset House, London. In a specially constructed room behind one-way glass, the public - all cameras surrendered - are invited to watch the five week process as a live sound-sculpture. Murphy exclusively documents the experiment with the same forensic vision and private access as their travels.
By capturing the immediacy of their encounters with the people and places they visited, Murphy shows the humanity at the heart of the work, tracing the sources of the songs, their special metamorphosis into recorded music, and ultimately, cinema.
Official Selection Berlinale 2019 - Panorama Dokumente - World premiere
The Syrian war has raged on for over seven years, leaving hundreds of thousands of children traumatised - many of them living in refugee camps having fled the country. Professor and musician Nigel Osborne has been working in such situations since 1992, when he discovered the positive effects music therapy was having on children in Bosnia affected by such trauma.
Since then Nigel’s techniques have been developed and are now utilised as part of a creative arts programme delivered to children traumatised by war - but how do these methods work, and do they really make a difference to the lives of children who have experienced unspeakable horrors and pain at such a young age?
Official Selection Tribeca Film Festival 2019
Behind the picture postcard idyll of a Cornish fishing village alienation, resentment and anger bubble away. The view may be beautiful, but you can’t eat it.
Martin Ward, is a cove-fishermen without a boat, infuriated with his brother for using the family vessel for day-tripping, and with a brooding resentment for tourists flocking to the village while locals are relegated to an estate on the hill. Nearing the end of the summer season, an argument over a parking space with the incomers who bought his old family home comes to represent all that is wrong with the world for Martin. Tensions rise and when a misguided prank and retaliation escalates to tragedy the brothers are forced to unite and face the future together.
Shifting light, captured on B&W 16mm film and processed by hand, offers a grainy black and white polemic; the state of the nation seen through a family lens. Rugged cliffs, stark seascapes, working hands, silent faces, the screech of a gull, the smoke from a barbeque, clashing classes, tensions building, a casual theft, a threat issued, a punch thrown, retribution, high tide, low water, laughter at dusk, regret in the morning, beauty, anger, compassion, hope.
Official Selection Berlinale 2019 - Forum - World premiere
