Projects matching: ISO

Synopsis

This is a film about two comedians. Maung Thura, better known as Zarganar, is Burma's greatest living comic. Relentlessly victimised by the Burmese military junta, he is now in prison. Michael Mittermeier, in stark contrast, is free to practise his art of humour and provocation as one of Germany's leading stand up comedians.

Synopsis

An 18 year-old girl arrives at St Andrews University in 2001 to find an alien world of glossy, upper-class girls intent on seducing their fellow student Prince William. Isolated, she finds hope in a mysterious boy who wears a silver jacket.

Synopsis

Twenty years after his departure to the Trojan War, Odysseus still has not returned home. So his son, Telemachus sets off an epic journey in search of his lost father. So begins Homer's epic poem, The Odyssey - the narrative reference point for John Akomfrah's unusual and genre defying story about chance, fate and redemption.   Structured as an allegorical fable and loosely inspired by existential science fiction, The Nine Muses is a stylised, unusual and idiosyncratic retelling of the history of mass migration to post-war Britain through the suggestive lens of the Homeric epic.   Divided into nine overlapping musical chapters and mixing a vast array of archival material, The Nine Muses is a modern recasting of Homer's epic as a 'song cycle' about journeys, migration, memory and the power of elegy.

Synopsis

Nadger has a violent streak that’s landed him in trouble more times than he can remember. Now he walks out of prison expecting to find his young stepmother waiting for him. But she’s not there. Instead there’s an angel.

Synopsis

Part documentary, part drama, Buried Land tells the story of ordinary people attempting to realize a dream. Two actors cut a path through the real community and strange reality of Visoko, the small town at the heart of a remarkable claim: the discovery of ancient pyramids in central Bosnia. Emir is a Bosnian immigrant, removed during the war and now struggling to rediscover his homeland. He has returned to assist an American director in the making of a film about Visoko's pyramids. Everyone in the town is asked to participate, including Avdija, a tourist agent with the Pyramid Foundation, Semir Osmanagi, the quixotic founder of the Valley of the Pyramids, and Zombi, who oversees the digging of the labyrinthine tunnels found beneath the hills.   Emir and his director are accused by the press of being like 'Borat in Bosnia', seeking to mock the town's believers. Emir's outlandish behavior grows more excessive and confused, culminating in a grandiose shoot at the summit of the Moon Pyramid that descends into chaos. He is taken into the heart of the Pyramid of the Sun, where he is forced to confront his beliefs. Where does fact end and fiction begin?

Synopsis

Anarchic, black, buddy comedy based on the true story of the infamous grave robbers. A romantic idealist and budding capitalist fall foul of the law trying to scratch a living in 18th century Edinburgh.

Synopsis

Donor Unknown follows the story of Jo Ellen Marsh, 20, as she goes in search of the sperm donor father she only knows as Donor 150. Jo Ellen has always known her family 'wasn't like other families'. She grew up in Pennsylvania with two mothers, and a burning curiosity to know more about her anonymous donor father. When Jo Ellen discovers a unique online registry that connects donor-conceived children, she manages to track down a half-sister in New York. The New York Times picks up the story, and, over time, 12 more half-siblings emerge across the USA.   The New York Times article also falls into the hands of Jeffrey Harrison, living alone with four dogs and a pigeon in a broken-down RV in a Venice Beach car park. In the 1980s, Jeffrey supplemented his meagre income by becoming a sperm donor at California Cryobank. His number was Donor 150. Donor Unknown follows Jo Ellen from her discovery of her siblings, to the moment Jeffrey steps forward to identify himself as Donor 150, to her decision to travel to California to meet him.

Synopsis

Based on the book by Ken Bruen, London Boulevard is the story of a man newly released from prison who falls in love with a reclusive young movie star and finds himself in a duel with a vicious gangster.

Synopsis

Set in rural and urban Britain, The Silent Accomplice is a story seen through the perspective of water that flows from a spring to the sea. This ever-present silent protagonist engages with people in often intimate moments in their lives, giving us an unusual and intimate snap shot of contemporary living. Episodic and peripatetic in construction, and poetically blending fiction and documentary, the narrative weaves its way in and out of specific people’s lives to reveal a Britain with hidden and unspoken disparities and aspirations. Using simple and ritch visual and aural imagery, The Silent Accomplice embraces the notion of silence to drive a narrative that creates an unusual experiential journey. From the sublime to the mundane, the peaceful to the violent, we are presented with a view of contemporary British life not commonly seen.

Synopsis

A campaign for healthy school dinners arouses suspicion with the introduction of a healthy, but great tasting, hamburger. A group of students set out to uncover the secret of the burgers’ taste; a quest that leads them to a shocking discovery and a fight for their lives. A high school enforces a healthy eating regime in an attempt to stop the children eating junk. The old dinner lady is fired and the school introduces Mr. Goodwin whose catering company has the secret recipe to a Burger the children will love, yet is good for them too. A group of disparate students grow suspicious and band together to uncover the secret ingredient and the answer to why so many students have started to disappear.

Synopsis

Working for your festival ticket is hard, especially under the watchful eye of the Security Supervisor. The Gate is a short stopmotion animation which follows the journey of George as he works as a gate steward for his music festival ticket.

Synopsis

A writer returns, disillusioned, to London and Paris. He begins on a story: a sleeper cell of young, glamorous urban terrorists. Gabriella, glamorous trophy wife of a young king-in-exile, holed up in an opulent London riverside penthouse, falls under the spell of a modern-day Che Guevara and, Patty Hearst-style, enlists in The Cause. She is sent to Paris under the 'front' of a drama student aiming at film. She takes her studies exceptionally seriously: encounters Bernard Stiegler, the leading philosopher on the subject of cinema and the human condition, and other luminaries. And she meets fellow-"student" activists, half-sister and -brother Julia and Sam, skilled actors who seem more interested in petty crime and scams. Their father is a political prisoner held in London; is he the master-mind? Has he been grooming them since childhood? Our writer adopts the persona of a sleuth as he follows these anti-heroes. Books are passed, stolen: do they bear coded messages? Why is Gabriella obsessed with capturing her interviews on an outdated Nagra tape-recorder? What is their connection with the incipient terrorism on the city streets? So our writer/sleuth uncovers events; but is he documenting actuality, or inventing a fiction?