“Born in the hour of India’s freedom. Handcuffed to history.” Midnight’s Children is an epic film from Academy Award-nominated director Deepa Mehta, based on the Booker Prize-winning novel by Salman Rushdie.
At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, as India proclaims independence from Great Britain, two newborn babies are switched by a nurse in a Bombay hospital. Saleem Sinai, the illegitimate son of a poor Hindu woman, and Shiva, the offspring of wealthy Muslims, are fated to live the destiny meant for each other. Their lives become mysteriously intertwined and are inextricably linked to India’s whirlwind journey of triumphs and disasters.
Lifelong drifter Christopher Ellis has made his home on a small island off the west coast of Scotland. For six years he has lived in virtual isolation, being the only inhabitant of the island and rarely returning to the mainland.
Every winter Christopher journeys on foot to his home town of Leeds to earn a month’s wage as a pot washer in an Italian restaurant - enough for him to live off for the next year.
My Island is a portrait of one man’s lifelong pursuit of independence. A proud, self-defined tramp, Christopher Ellis challenges modern expectations about settling down, instead finding a simple pleasure in living hand-to-mouth in reflective seclusion.
Mystic Fighters will take your breath away with a strong
cinematography based on a character driven narrative and you will
discover the deadly art of stick fighting in Trinidad & Tobago like no one has approached it before.
It takes you into a world beyond preconceptions where the poorest becomes the man of knowledge and the guardian to one of the eldest traditions based on the interaction between man and nature.
A short film featuring the track Oh Jackie by singer/ songwriter Louise Quinn & French electronic artist Kid Loco. Set backstage in a 1920's musichall & shot at Cumbernauld theatre. The singer gets ready to take the stage but never quite gets there....
'Piercing Brightness' is a science fiction film directed by internationally acclaimed artist Shezad Dawood and set in Preston, Lancashire. The film looks to play on the border between mainstream narrative cinema and experimental film making and utilises science fiction as a backdrop from which to contest fixed notions of race, migration and identity. The film combines digital and analogue processes, high production values and low-fi aesthetics to tell a story through both its narrative and distortions of time brought about by experiments with the various formats used. It incorporates local institutions and people as extended cast, in a process whereby there is a slippage between fiction and document.
Jiang and Shin, agents who have been dispatched from the home planets, land in a spaceship outside Preston, in the North of England. In the guise of a young Chinese boy and girl they are to re-establish contact and effect the retrieval of the 'Glorious 100', agents who were sent to this planet millennia ago to study and observe. Living through countless lives without any scope for return, many have become corrupted, forgetting their original purpose and slowly becoming influenced by and in turn influencing their adopted home.
‘PROTO’: a sci-fi action adventure about a child-like, experimental robot, set in the robotics lab where he has been built. Although PROTO has been made to fulfil the ambitions of his creator, Prof. Andrews, he learns to find his own dreams and ambitions, and the strength needed to realise them.
A stranger emerges from the landscape and inveigles his way into the isolated house of a single female artist. He takes up residence; undetected... Over the course of a year, the artist remains unaware of her uninvited guest, though his presence gradually influences the development of her current project, leading towards an unexpected denouement...
3 Continents, 4 barbers, 1 story... The Fade is an intimate portrait of four barbers across the world over a week in their lives. The observational documentary reveals a portrait of their lives and shines a light on the profession barbering. Set in Ghana,Jamaica, USA and the UK the film interweaves their stories and examines the polarized opposites of the locations. Creating an international dialog of the colorful lives of four men who do they same thing in different time zones, with very different realities.
Reclusive billionaire Morgan Nash spends his days tending to his dying catatonic wife Amy, until an eccentric scientist offers him a chance to relive love all over again. However, to fulfill this process Nash will need to make the impossible decision to murder his old self.
Richard, an unemployed 55-year-old, arrives 3 minutes late for his appointment at a job centre. An advisor, stifled by the limits of the system she works in, has no choice but to penalise him for his tardiness. To avoid plunging further into destitution, Richard takes desperate measures.
We are responsible for our dreams. This is the ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis – and fiction cinema. The makers of THE PERVERT'S GUIDE TO CINEMA return with THE PERVERT'S GUIDE IDEOLOGY. Philosopher and public intellectual Slavoj Zizek, and filmmaker Sophie Fiennes use their inventive interpretation of moving pictures to present a compelling cinematic journey into the heart of ideology – the dreams and collective beliefs that shape our political, social and cultural life.
Official Selection Toronto International Film Festival 2012 - World premiere
