The discovery of a mysterious black box in a small remote village in Iran causes turmoil among the villagers. According to a public announcement, it is promised to make the finder of the box prosperous.
On survival and transformation inspired by Catherine Lord’s memoir 'The Summer of Her Baldness' a moving and irreverent account of her experience of breast cancer and the chemically induced devastation of chemotherapy. This piece draws into focus the intersection of queer identity, cross-generational dialogue, illness, and the fine line between alternately poisonous and curative substances.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2017 - Experimenta Strand
Mad To Be Normal reveals the story of R.D. Laing, a psychiatrist known as one of Scotland's greatest thinkers. Working out of Kingsley Hall - situated in East London throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Laing performed various daring experiments on people who were at the time known as disturbed.
His methods included using LSD and a type of self-healing, known as metanoia, much to the dismay and outrage of the psychiatric community.
In the future, prisons will be overrun. Authorities will provide access to the jails via online portals. Advertisers will fund the jails and subscribers, able to access any felon day or night, will sign up in their millions. This is the story of one escaped prisoner who - on discovering he's the world's most downloaded felon - will stop at nothing to win back his anonymity.
An artist falls for a young married woman while he's commissioned to paint her portrait during the tulip mania of 17th century Amsterdam. The lovers gamble on raising money from the booming market for tulip bulbs to fund their escape.
Based on Deborah Moggach's best-selling novel 'Tulip Fever'.
Seventeen-year-old Ying Ling is away from home training to become a mortician at one of China’s largest funeral homes. Despite her fear of ghosts and dead bodies, she learns the spa rituals; cleaning and massaging the corpses while the grieving families look on.
Ying Ling finds solace from her macabre role through her playful banter with another of the young morticians. Together, they spend their time off talking about their hopes, fears and plans for the future.
As one of many rural-to-urban teenagers working to support her family, Ying Ling must immerse herself in the surreal and grinding world of China’s industrialisation of mortality. With intimate access and moments of humour, we follow Ying Ling as she learns about life while surrounded by death.
Official Selection Berlinale 2017 - Generation 14plus - World premiere
A study of the transformation of asbestos extraction from the earth to extraction from the walls. In this piece the artists ask how both filming and the use of found footage can be thought of as forms of extraction: extracting images from forms and from contexts.
Mined, extracted, and woven, asbestos was the magic mineral. Towns became cities under its patronage, Persian kings entertained guests with its fireproof nature, and centuries of industry raked in the profits of its global application. We now live in the remains of this toxic dream, a dream that with the invention of electron microscopes revealed our material history as a disaster in waiting. Yet the asbestos industry has far from left us, with extraction from the soil transforming to extraction from our walls. We are now faced with two options: to remove this material from our homes and start anew, or to build upon its residue. Removal is a dangerous and costly operation. So often we choose to live amongst it instead, choking out our walls with plastic tarping: the failed promises of modernism literally entombed all around us.
Shot in the mining township of Asbestos, Quebec, home to the world’s largest asbestos mine, that only stopped extraction in 2012, the film is a meditation on the entanglement of the fragility of bodies, the nonlinearity of progress, and the persistence of matter. (Sasha Litvintseva and Graeme Arnfield)
Official Selection Berlinale 2017 - Forum Expanded
Jake and his friends pass their time hanging out in the courtyards of their high-rise development or in pool halls, talking about girls, watching pornos and getting drunk. They all have their own demons, but Jake's secret is one that he can't tell anyone.
Official Selection Berlinale 2017 - Generation 14plus - World premiere
‘Bo’ Gritz is one of America’s highest decorated Vietnam veterans and the alleged real life inspiration behind Rambo. He also killed 400 people, turned against Washington and moved to the Nevada desert where he now sleeps with many weapons. Filmed over ten years using impressive visual material, Zimmerman’s portrait of Bo embodies contemporary American society in all its dizzying complexity and contradictions.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2017 - Experimenta Strand
Paris, 1964. Alberto Giacometti, the celebrated artist, bumps into his old friend, a respected American critic, James Lord, and suggests that he sit for a portrait because he has an interesting face. Lord is flattered by the request, but as the days go by and turn into weeks and weeks seemingly with no end in sight, he realises his entire life has been hijacked by the erratic genius. The portrait continues to ebb and flow. Veering between frustration and joy, Lord ultimately sees logic in the artist's chaotic mind and witnesses Giacometti complete one of his last masterpieces.
Official Selection Berlinale 2017 - Out of Competition - World premiere
A dystopian alternate history television series based on the 1976 novel 'SS-GB' by Len Deighton.
The Battle of Britain has ended in victory for Hitler’s Germany and the population of 1940s Britain struggles to adjust to life under Nazi occupation. Renowned London detective Douglas Archer is caught between his brutal new SS bosses and a ruthless British resistance movement while investigating what looks to be a black market- related murder. As Archer gets closer to the truth, he struggles to uphold the law and protect those he loves from two sides prepared to go to any lengths to control the ultimate outcome of the Second World War.
Berlinale Special Series will premiere the first two episodes of the mini-series.
Official Selection Berlinale 2017 - Berlinale Special Series - World premiere
A comedy wrapped around a tragedy, which unfolds in real time in a house in London in the present day. Janet is hosting an intimate gathering of friends to celebrate her promotion to Shadow Minister of Health in the party of opposition. Her husband, Bill, seems preoccupied. As their friends arrive, some of whom have their own dramatic news to share, the soirée gradually unravels. An announcement by Bill provokes a series of revelations that rapidly escalate into all-out confrontation. As people’s illusions about themselves and each other go up in smoke, along with the canapes, the party becomes a night that began with champagne but ends with blood on the floor.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2017 - Special Presentation
