Projects with status: Complete

Synopsis

Based on Raymond Briggs' award-winning graphic novel 'Ethel & Ernest', this animated feature film is a funny and touching tribute to his parents. An entertaining and heart-warming story about two people who fall in love against the background of immense social change in the mid 20th Century, experiencing the Depression, World War II, postwar austerity and cultural upheaval.
Forty years of change, one enduring love.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Love Strand - World premiere

Synopsis

Two evolutionary biologists, Niles Eldredge and Armand Marie Leroi consider the analogies and differences between the cultural and the biological realms, comparing the history of life within the fossil record with the evolution of pop music. Marquiss draws on Eldredge’s pattern of evolution as a cue for image-making processes and editing structures to transpose scientific enquiry into cultural production.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand

Synopsis

A cinematic portrait of New York School composer Christian Wolff. Challenging the limits and conventions of documentary form, this 16mm film continues artist Luke Fowler’s ongoing investigations into vanguard thinkers and cultural producers.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand

Synopsis

Upside down stop-frame images follow a path through Epping Forest on the edge of East London, revealing the beauty of a topsy-turvy forest. The film recalls the attempt by the British government to privatise all the UK forests, but then had to do a U-turn due to large public pressure.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand

Synopsis

Leke, a mixed heritage man living in London, is a successful photographer. His privileged lifestyle allows him to navigate his Black British identity largely on his own hedonistic terms. But when a message from Senegal calls him ‘home’, Leke must confront the psychological intricacies of his heritage and forge a new sense of self.
Moving from brooding London cityscapes to an almost trancelike stillness as Leke travels through to his Senegalese village in Popenguine, director Joseph a. Adesunloye skilfully evokes the internal dichotomy Leke faces. (LFF brochure)
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Journey Strand - World premiere

Synopsis

19-year-old Billy Lynn, an Army private infantryman recounts the final hours before he and his fellow soldiers return to Iraq.
Lynn, along with his 'Bravo' company, survived a harrowing Iraq battle which was covered by news cameras and instantly made them 'famous enough' to be brought home by the Defense Department for a promotional tour culminating in a spectacular halftime show at a Thanksgiving Day football game. The high-intensity media extravaganza summons memories of the trauma of losing Billy Lynn's beloved sergeant in a firefight.
Based on Ben Fountain's best-selling novel.

Synopsis

George Best, Northern Ireland’s legendary star remains one of the most naturally gifted footballers there has ever been. Famously called the ‘best player in the world’ by Pelé, George Best galvanised Manchester United’s five-year recovery from the tragedy of the Munich air crash. His skill and exuberance inspired them to win league titles and the European Cup, even though he was little more than a teenager.
Tragically, his career in the upper echelons of sport was over before he turned 29, the result of his bruising battle with alcoholism and the crushing pressure of modern fame. (After all, this was Britain in the frenzy of Beatle-mania and 1960s youth culture, where Best was dubbed ‘El Beatle’ by the world’s media.) (LFF brochure)
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Journey Strand - World premiere

Synopsis

Taking as its starting point the photographic archives of the Thistle Foundation and Craigmillar Festival Society, rather than examining the known facts and details of the photographs held in the archives, the narrator uses them to recall her own memories of making photographs as a teenager.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand

Synopsis

Filmed in and around the island of Taiwan, the film is structured around an interview with contemporary artist Chen Chieh-Jen. The film explores the relationship between film, landscape and rural life and the layered histories of these sites as potential places of self-organisation and resistance. Built around the question of translation and the relationship of what we hear to what we see, the film follows Chen's retelling of the farmer's tradition of using film screenings as means of covert political assembly during the Japanese colonial rule of Taiwan.
The title is an English translation of the Chinese term / yúnhai, used to describe the view from Taiwan's highest mountains when everything below is hidden from view by a sea of clouds.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand - World premiere

Synopsis

A detective goes undercover as a patient to investigate a psychotherapist he believes is linked to a strange double murder. As his therapy sessions continue the line between fantasy and reality begins to blur…
A dark psychological thriller about murder, madness, maths and magic.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Thrill Strand - World premiere

Synopsis

Made in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, a free adaptation of the poem 'The Sea is History' by Derek Walcott as a materialist and animist critique of the monumentalisation of European colonial history and its ripples into the present.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Experimenta Strand

Synopsis

News of a new girlfriend disrupts mother-and-son crime duo Bunny and Clive.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Journey Strand - World premiere