1840 and another ship crashes on the rocks of an almost deserted island in Scotland. Three sailors survive the wreck and make it to shore where the few locals take them in as they wait for the mainland boat to come for them. But the sailors' survival story has only just started as they uncover the strange past of the once vibrant island.
Two trans people and their journey to learning to love their bodies.
A film about the effects hormones can have on your body as a trans person. Mainstream narratives often sensationalise the experiences of trans people with medical interventions, but this film explores the issue of hormones in more depth, in an honest, bold and vulnerable way.
Determined to gate-crash her ex-lover’s funeral on glamorous French hideaway Île de Ré, former Hollywood siren Helen escapes her London retirement home with the help of repressed English housewife Priscilla.
Pooling their limited resources, they hit the road together by coach, ferry, car, and foot in a race to get to the funeral on time, becoming embroiled in a romantic triangle with an Italian painter along the way. On this unforgettable journey, they find true friendship in one another – and have the time of their lives... on a road trip like no other.
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
