A surreal short film set in the ruins of London, driven by a contemporary music-hall libretto. The film contrasts the beautiful and grotesque in a narrative focusing on the universal question - are our lives driven by destiny or chance?
This powerful short narrative embodies key aspects of the classic Gothic tale, with echoes of Du Maurier's Trilby and Le Fanu's dark stories.
The mystery of the 'true' nightmare of the narrative is left to the viewer to decide.
Green Pages is a futuristic comedy, an adaptation of the phone book! A man and a woman working for the Green Pages Data Entry Department, meet, fall in love, make love, fall out, hate each other and they never speak a single line of dialogue. Nothing but entries into the phone book - name, address, telephone number, again and again. The film is executed in a single 15 minute take.
After unprecedented rainfall the desert of Death Valley burst into flower. Unseen in living memory, the flowers drew tourists from around the world.
Greetings from Death Valley tells three stories from this forgotten landscape. From the last two residents in a gold rush town. From a village at the edge of a lake dried up to feed water to the distant city of Los Angeles. From the proposed site of the dump for all of the USA's nuclear waste.
Told through the voices of residents living with the consequences of these events, the film is three postcards from places America would rather ignore.
Guilfest has been running since 1993 in Guildford, Surrey UK. Acts in previous years have included Paul Weller, Jools Holland, and Van Morrison. The Documentary covers more than just the music, with interviews, history of the music festival, musical acts, and a true insight into how an independent music festival is produced. A different angle on modern day music festival documentaries, cameras were given out to festival goers to record their experiences over the three days.
Set on a militant horticultural nursery, Guilty By Nature follows the life cycle of a wild and vigorous shrub; exploring ideas of individuality and persecution. The film is shot with extreme close-ups, varied frame rates and an exaggerated soundscape.
We are all influenced by the films we watch though not perhaps so much as the characters found in this short. First there is Z, the fish'n'chips loving, 'man in black' Asian guy who makes a dubious living selling, stealing and selling again the same battered old VCR. His customers include Q, Irish girl with a sideline in drug smuggling and a penchant for Bollywood movies, music and clothes, and who sets out for revenge when she discovers her new VCR is stolen again. Running literally riot through the film is a couch potato who has finally doned his 80s adidas tracksuit a la superman.
Influenced by the action movies he's fed himself with, he decides to wreck havoc on women, children and the old. Then there is Mod, the black guy with a taste for Kung Fu films and nunchukas, and Football Italia, the final buyer of the VCR and instrumental in the dramatic and hilarious climax of the film.
Based on Mario Petrucci's award-winning book-length poem for Chernobyl, Half Life tells the story of the people who dealt with the world's worst nuclear disaster at ground level: the fire-fighters, the soldiers, the 'liquidators' and their families.
Half Term is a powerful study of one boy's journey into the treacherous terrain of manhood. Mark's entire future seems to implode on one week's nightmare holiday visit to his absent father in remote coastal Cornwall, a visit that will change his life forever.
Hamlet is a ghost story - so why has nobody ever told it as one?
In Fodor's Hamlet emphasis is put on the nightmarish ether of the play, setting it in a surrealistic no-man's land.
Rather than following traditional, schoolbook definitions of characters, these are ripped apart. So, for example, the traditionally weak Ophelia, is now dominated by her elder sister Polonia (normally a male comic role) who supplies her with addictive drugs to cement that control. Hamlet's father, The Ghost (normally an heroic victim) is now a vicious psychopath, manipulating his own son to gain brutal vengeance on his murderer, Claudius.
And yet not a single line is added or changed, the difference is how they are delivered - naturalistically with the emphasis on making sure an audience who may never even have heard a single line of Shakespeare accept it as though it is merely an alternative accent of English.
