Grandmother is a Crab borrows from an earlier digital video, made fifteen years ago, that itself used footage captured from a travel advertisement on television. Black and white, and mirror effects, take the image out of time, giving it both vividness and distance. The music is played in reverse. And the voice-over and under-titles are a poem that re-enters the magic world of a child on a beach.
Happy Returns
I bought a scrapbook collection of one woman’s Birthday cards from a house clearance shop a few years ago. She had only kept the cards from her children and grandchildren. It cost me £ 1.99.
The cards chronicle her life through changing design/slogans and written messages. I’ve bought things like this before and they just fill up my shelves.
A poetry film festival kick-started me into making a film using the scrapbook. I looked for a poem to base the cards around but couldn’t find anything suitable, so I tried to write my own.
Johnny, a small time crook and Marie, a dissatisfied shop assistant are both looking for a fresh start. Greta and Pearse meet in extraordinary circumstances on a bridge overlooking the city. With Greta facing a terminal illness and Pearse with a bounty on his head, this unlikely duo fall unexpectedly, helplessly in love before fate and circumstance take over. A wayward corpse and this unlikely love story all compose the jigsaw puzzle as the night's events expertly fall into place, weaving an existential portrait of our characters' lives as their hopes, fears and secrets are revealed.
Macropolis is the story of two reject toys who escape from the factory. Determined to rejoin the other toys, they lose themselves in the big city. Shot in an unusual combination of stop motion, CGi and time-lapse photography, this short film is animated entirely on the streets of Belfast.
Unprecedented access to the twentieth century's most revered war photographer. Don McCullin worked for The Sunday Times from 1969 to 1984, at a time where, under the editorship of Harold Evans, the newspaper was widely recognized as being at the cutting-edge of world journalism, with Don as its star photographer. During that period he covered wars and humanitarian disasters on virtually every continent and the prominence given to his photo essays coincided with one of the most remarkable periods in the history of photojournalism.
With extensive input from Sir Harold Evans, McCullin not only explores Don’s life and work, but also how the ethos of journalism changed during his career. Using the Sunday Times as an example, it compares the strictly ‘hands off’ approach of proprietors like Lord Thompson, who took pride in the fact that he did not want commercial considerations to censor his editors’ from printing what they wanted, to how the newspaper’s independent character changed once it was taken over by Rupert Murdoch, and the pursuit of advertising revenue became paramount, and with it, the inevitable obsessed with fashion, status and celebrity.
A coruscating drama, based on an award winning novel, which explores the troubled relationships between the various members of an English family over a long summer when Eleanor, the stroke-afflicted old mother decides to give away her beautiful house in Provence to a New Age Foundation run by an Irish charlatan rather than to her own son and his young family. The story is told from the point-of-view firstly of Robert, an eight year old boy, then his increasingly drunken father, Patrick and also finally Mary, his long-suffering mother as they all struggle to come to terms with the loss of something they love desperately but increasingly realize will soon be gone forever. It is both a funny and moving tale of family discord.
Set in the future and after decades of civil wars, a group of colonists on a far off planet, make a last stand against overwhelming odds to aid the escape of a handful of survivors.
1968 Film Group produce Featurette on the 'Battle of the Somme' filmed on location in Picardie, Northern France, across 2010/11. Using image and sound the film captures the landscape today where thousands perished and are still missing.
First it was a bet, then an internationally best-selling book and now Tony Hawks' eccentric, hilarious Playing The Moldovans at Tennis, is a feature film starring Anatol Durbala, Stephen Frost, Angus Deayton, Morwenna Banks, Pat Cash and Alistair McGowan. Tony attempts to win a silly bet, but soon becomes embroiled in an uplifting and life changing adventure in a little known country on the eastern fringes of Europe. The eccentric wager was made in a London pub during a televised World Cup qualifying match between England v Moldova and resulted in Tony trying to track down the entire Moldovan football team, challenge them individually to a game of tennis, and beat them all! Along the way Tony discovers that he may have bitten off more than he can chew. In Europe's poorest country, that endures daily power shortages, bullying gangsters, and even an illegal and lawless breakaway republic, he finds that it's not that easy to coax footballers onto a tennis court. Playing the Moldovans at Tennis is a life affirming, warm and moving film that shows us that, in love stories you don't always fall in love with another person - sometimes, it's a country.
Quartet tells the story of Reggie (Courtenay), Wilf (Connolly) and Cissy (Collins) who reside in Beecham House, a home for retired opera singers. Each year they stage a concert to celebrate Verdi's birthday, which also raises funds for the home. Reggie's ex-wife Jean (Smith) arrives at the home and creates tension, playing the diva part but refusing to sing in the concert.
