Projects with status: Complete

Synopsis

A character study of the relationship between a professional poker playing mother and her film making daughter, set against the backdrop of the World Series of Poker. 

Synopsis

Polanow is a winter’s tale from Eastern Europe. It tells the old, familiar story of the end of love. In this version, a beautiful ice queen marries a warm-blooded mortal. She tries to show him Polanow, her mystical birthplace, but he does not have enough magic in his heart to see it.

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A typical day in the life of a not so typical old lady.

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A man finds a magic lamppost.

Synopsis

The big day has arrived - everything is planned. He's going to propose to his girlfriend - it will be the perfect day. But when he sees her at the station, he sees a bizarre man who keeps appearing, seemingly to no-one but him. Turning this into a hell of a day!

Synopsis

A street gang cross Glasgow to witness the arrival of a group of Somali refugees. A closely observed portrait of racism, friendship and adolescents

Synopsis

During the Bosnian conflict the population of Sarajevo spent almost four years under seige. This is a story of how a troubled youth strove to keep their sanity through the music they made; parties they organised and radio they broadcast. We chart the last ten years of a music scene and a youth culture still carrying the scars of war but looking toward the future with hope and spirit.

Synopsis

Robert Burns overcomes his upbringing as a farm labourer to become the national poet of Scotland. Love comes his way in the form of Jean Armour but his attempts at securing a happy relationship are blighted by Jean's father who disapproves of Burns. Finally, Jean and Robbie are married and Burns tries to settle down to a happy married life, but the success of his literary career brings with it many temptations and he is unable to resist the attention of the aristocratic women who fawn upon him.   Finding difficulties in supporting his growing family of children, Burns seeks work as a local tax and excise officer in the port of Dumfries as Britain is threatened by the spread of the French Revolution. He meets and falls in love with married aristocrat Maria Riddell, and he is unwittingly exposed to rumour and innuendo. Siding with the sentiments of the revolution, his republican stance provokes retaliation from the aristocracy. Walter Riddell, Maria's husband, circulates false rumours to ruin his reputation. Systematically Burns is ousted from all polite society, and reduced to poverty by his government employers. Only his wife Jean and his friend Lewars stand by him.   Burns, blighted by illness since youth, bids to ease his suffering by giving in to the cures of Doctor Maxwell, who wrongly prescribes mercury. Faced with death, Burns reaffirms his love for Maria, and comes to terms with his powerlessness to right his many affairs and the tragedy of his marriage to Jean as he fights to make sure his work is not destroyed. 

Synopsis

An old lady remembers the journey she made as a newly-wed from England to Czechoslovakia in 1945.

Synopsis

Riva is the portrait of a woman, Riva Ben Eliezer, now ninety years old. How do you look at the life of someone who has lived through so much? I would look at her hands, wrinkled and old, and think, these are the hands that did all those things, that were communist in Palestine, that were imprisoned and tortured, that bore children and a great and terrible war, that lived in Siberia, that taught kindergarten, that wrote books. These hands, no other, did this, and this is what they look like now. This is what time and life has done to my grandmother's hands.   But the film is more than that. It is more than a portrait of a woman who lived through extraordinary times, who was a Jew in a place and time when there was nothing and nowhere worse to be. It is the portrait of a whole life, not just the sections that have the most drama. It is the portrait of her now - for now contains all her past, somehow, in her hands and in her face. In her voice and especially in her laugh.   It is a private film made for the public. The use of hand processed images, with their patina of blotches and scratches, creats a space for Riva to exist, where the presentation of her ninety-year-old body is not intrusive but respectful. It is a private film also because it was made in private, just me and her, so our relationship becomes a part of it.   It is not my intention with this film to deify Riva. Just to show her, as I see her, because it is important to see the lives of others, lives that have been deeply lived, as Riva's has.

Synopsis

Irrfan Khan (The Warrior) and Koel Purie (Everybody Says I'm Fine) lead this surreal rites of passage encounter between a dysfunctional, coke-snorting fashion model and an ultra-focussed, strong-silent stranger who are thrown together by chance. Set in the magnificent wilderness moon-scape of Ladakh, India, the road journey and the strange encounters that follow provide a dramatic backdrop for the relationship that develops. Both are outsiders, both are lonely, both crave the human contact that their roles in society deny them. Tentatively they search each other out in a film that is poised between elusiveness and engagement, suspicion and tenderness - at once hilarious and sinister, bizarre and moving, psychedelic and intensely real, Road to Ladakh is an original story scripted, edited and produced by director Ashvin Kumar.

Synopsis

Set in a near future, where technology owes more to the 1930's than to the 21st century, Room Service begins when a mysterious intruder armed with a collection of home-made tools and devices breaks into the bedroom of a sleeping woman.