"A polyphonic meditation on time and urban space" (Sukhdev Sandhu, BFI 2012).
"If you let it, a street will grow" says a voice in this film-poem which offers a lyrical, painterly defence of the everyday and a celebration of multiculturalism, even as it poses questions about the process of regeneration.
Shot on location in the London Borough of Hackney, the film interweaves rarely seen archive, super 16mm and super 8mm photography. Slow, still shots of streets, parks, cemeteries and markets are juxtaposed with the East London paintings of Leon Kossoff, Jock McFadyen and James MacKinnon.
With a script based on poet, Michael Rosen's play for voices, a heightened soundscape mixes documentary with poetry, music, song and location recordings. As we slip between past and present, real and imagined, famous and unknown "the world comes to Hackney": From Shakespeare in Shoreditch, to a Jamaican builder, from an 18th Century feminist abolitionist to a Turkish barber, from Anna Sewell's "Black Beauty" to the Jewish 43 Group taking on Oswald Mosley in Dalston, the audience is invited to apprehend the city as fragmentary and multi-layered, "past in the present, present in the past."
Wreckers is an evocative, beautifully shot drama that examines the fragile relationship between truth, intimacy and betrayal. A married couple move back to his childhood village to start a family. Their relationship seems idyllic but a surprise visit from the husband's brother ignites sibling rivalry, exposing a savage past and the lies embedded in the couple's relationship.
In 2nd-Century Roman-ruled Britain, a young Roman soldier endeavours to honour his father's memory by finding his lost legion's golden emblem. Two men – master and slave – venture beyond the edge of the known world on a dangerous and obsessive quest that will push them beyond the boundaries of loyalty and betrayal, friendship and hatred, deceit and heroism.
Adapted from Rosemary Sutcliff’s classic novel "The Eagle of the Ninth."
In a small apartment in Buenos Aires, an old woman eagerly awaits the birth of her grandchild and all the joys of becoming a grandmother. However, horrific circumstances means she will be forced to wait over 30 years. Using real-life testimonials this animated-documentary raises issues of memory, repression and loss.
All Bertie Crisp wants is a quiet life in his seaside caravan home. However, when his devious wife Grace demands a baby immediately, he is forced to take matters into his own hands - with disastrous and hilarious consequences.
An ordinary family is accused of murder when a stranger dies at their dinner table. Two-time BAFTA winner Chris Langham stars as bumbling father Tom Thompson and the inimitable Simon Amstell makes his film debut as a sinister psychotherapist. Combining the quietly surreal with the beautifully mundane, Black Pond tells the hilarious and heart breaking story of how The Thompsons became known as the 'Family of Killers'.
Set in present-day Los Angeles, the story follows a vigilante who finds a way to infiltrate the lives of selected individuals through their cell phones. When he targets his first victim, things get out of hand. Is the victim alone or is someone in the room with him?
did I? explores amnesia and the devastation of severe memory loss through a series of abstract visual sequences. The work combines live action footage with hand drawn and 3D animation to evoke a sense of the fragmentary and disordered recollections of an amnesiac.
Based on the opening passage from Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics, a book which, amongst other queer characters, describes ornamental hermits, Sutcliffe uses George Harrison’s album cover from “All things Must Pass” as a visual counterpoint to a choral rendition of Sitwell’s text.
