"The striking and brutal realities of the students struggling for food, shelter and medication. Mimi's death from TB - and her illness unnoticed at first even by her closest friends - cannot but send a chilling chord in our modern world." A Cape Town-set reworking of Puccini’s La Bohème, sung in Xhosa (with some English dialogue).
'Breathe Umphefumlo' sees director Mark Dornford-May (U-Carmen eKhayelitsha) reunited with singer Pauline Malefane and the Isango Ensemble.
Berlinale 2015, Berlinale Special - World premiere
'The First Film' is filmmaker David Nicholas Wilkinson’s 32 year quest to prove that in October 1888 Louis Le Prince produced the world's first films in Leeds, England. Once Le Prince had perfected his projection machine he arranged to demonstrate his discovery to the American public in New York and thus the world. However on 16th September 1890, just weeks before he was due to sail to New York Louis Le Prince stepped onto the Dijon to Paris train and was never seen again. As no body was ever found no one could legally fight the Le Prince claim that he invented a camera that recorded the very first moving image. As a result, several years later, Thomas Edison and the Lumiere Brothers were to claim the glory and the prize of being acknowledged as the first people to pioneer film.
Louis Le Prince was never added to history books. But for one lone voice, who worked with him, Le Prince's name and his pioneering work was forgotten.
Edinburgh International Film Festival 2015 - World premiere
In the late 1970s, from a tenement flat in Edinburgh, Bob Last and Hilary Morrison operated their record label Fast Product. A predecessor to Rough Trade and Factory Records, Fast Product quickly became the hub for a group of ground-breakingly talented musicians.
The previously untold story of a post-punk/indie music scene that reverberated from Edinburgh, throughout the UK and beyond.
Edinburgh International Film Festival 2015 - World premiere
Grizzled cop Frank Grieves, struggles to keep his family together against a futuristic backdrop where recreational drugs are legal. When he delves too deeply into a case involving an unidentified corpse, he finds himself stifled by powerful government organisations. Soon caught up in a dangerous conspiracy Grieves finds that drug legalisation comes at a deadly price.
Edinburgh International Film Festival 2015 - World premiere
When an encounter with the swinging scene has an unexpected impact on David's impotence, Alice thinks she might have found the solution to all their problems, but the poly-amorous world is a difficult place for a love story to flourish.
Edinburgh International Film Festival 2015 - World premiere
Two young sisters watch Sam, their new teenage neighbour from afar. They track his movements on and offline. When they finally meet him, 10 year-old Dani strikes up a friendship and stops her spying, preferring to enjoy his company. But teenage Louisa takes a different path. During her continued surveillance of him she slips into obsession before stumbling across another observer.
'Macbeth' is the story of a fearless warrior and inspiring leader brought low by ambition and desire. A thrilling interpretation of the dramatic realities of the times and a reimagining of what wartime must have been like for one of Shakespeare’s most famous and compelling characters, a story of all-consuming passion and ambition, set in a war torn Scottish landscape.
Official Selection Cannes 2015 - In Competition
Renowned photojournalist Jennifer Preston, investigates the aftermath of a freak explosion of unknown origin at the center of her hedonistic city. Known simply as ‘the Catastrophe’, this shocking tragedy has left behind a festering wound on the city’s psyche: a several square mile Quarantine Zone (known as the QZ) of evacuated buildings and abandoned streets. Nobody in nobody out! Jennifer begins to see strange ephemeral phantoms in her photographs. She soon becomes obsessed with the idea that a paranormal phenomenon has been unleashed.
From BAFTA award-winning director Asif Kapadia (Senna), 'Amy' tells the incredible story of six-time Grammy-winner Amy Winehouse - in her own words. Employing extensive unseen archive footage, this modern and moving film shines a light on the world we live in.
A once-in-a-generation talent, Amy Winehouse instantly captured the world's attention. A pure jazz artist in the most authentic sense - she wrote and sung from the heart using her musical gifts to analyse her own problems. The combination of her raw honesty and supreme talent resulted in some of the most unique and adored songs of modern era. Tragically, relentless media attention coupled with Amy’s troubled relationships, her global success and precarious lifestyle saw her life fall apart. As a society, we celebrated her huge successes but were quick to judge her failings when it suited us. The talent that was initially her salvation eventually became the trigger for her disintegration.
Amy Winehouse died from alcohol poisoning in July 2011 at the age of 27.
Official Selection Cannes 2015 - Midnight Screenings
By Our Selves documents a four-day walk made by the English Poet John Clare. Toby Jones, Iain Sinclair and a Straw Bear follow in his footsteps exactly 150 years after his death. En route they bump into Macgillivray, Dr Simon Kovesi and the wizard Alan Moore. Meantime the journey is narrated by Toby’s father Freddie, a maverick actor who featured in numerous David Lynch films.
John Clare's escape from Epping Forest; an epic march through hunger and madness, is an English journey to set beside 'A Pilgrim's Progress'. Andrew Kötting, hyperkinetic camper-van captain of Gallivant, sets out in hot pursuit, dressed as a Straw Bear. Father and son, Freddie and Toby Jones, are possessed by the spirit of Clare, and locked in Beckettian embrace: one all-voice and one all-mute.
The writer Iain Sinclair watches from the shadows, Alan Moore waits like a bearded figure of fate, in Northampton and Dr Simon Kovesi hands out the medicine.
Captured in lustrous black and white photography, they discover the only truth of the road; whatever our hopes and delusions, we are always By Our Selves.
Inspired by Iain Sinclair’s Edge of the Orison and John Clare’s Journey out of Essex.
Inspired by D.F. Wallace's first short story, visualising mental discomfort as living on another planet to Earth, the film splits the character of May in two halves: one struggling in London in the past, the other one trying to recover in a youth clinic in the present -until the two storylines collide.
A successful young couple’s sheltered, affluent world is shattered when they each make a decision to neglect the needs of a vulnerable teenage girl. The husband exploits her, and the wife, unaware of her husband's actions, fails to respond to the girl's plight. When the girl invades their luxurious country home and scares the pregnant wife, the repercussions of their actions weigh heavily on their consciences, leading to traumatic reassessments of themselves, their relationship and the wider world around them.
