Projects in genres: Experimental

Synopsis

In the ex-colliery villages of East Durham, there is an abyss: falling down it is an easy thing. In a dangerous landscape, Barry, 40-year-old ex-youth worker, occasional labourer, wryly comic storyteller and single father, watches out for his 12-year-old son Callum. His eye is drawn to Emma, a 22-year-old with two children, Jade, 7 and Shannon, 4.  Barry likes to help, likes kids and likes Emma. But Emma has her own worries.   The film follows her personal journey as she single-mindedly tries to get her partner Darren off heroin: as she acquires the cocktail of drugs that will see him through his 'rattle' and takes him to 'The Breakies', a bleakly isolated collection of fishing huts, out beyond the steelworks, at the mouth of the Tees. And it follows Barry, Jade, Shannon and Callum in tow, picking up the pieces in a community that has moved further and further away from the economic mainstream. The abyss yawns and Barry negotiates the difficult terrain opening up from his own serious misjudgements. Watched by the disapproving Callum, his attempts to help Emma draw him ever closer to the edge.

Synopsis

One soundtrack runs simultaneously to three visual narratives, as snatched moments bring back memories of a younger self. A film about time and growing up.

Synopsis

The Commuter is a Surrealist film in which an office worker shaves his face off every morning in order to blend in with all the other faceless commuters on their way to work. A live-action/digital hybrid, it was repainted on computer frame by frame.  

Synopsis

The Slits travelled and toured widely as a group. Accompanying them during 1980 and 1981, Christine Robertson filmed intermittently on Super-8, collected whilst managing The Slits. Typical Girls was completed after the group split up in 1982. Filmed on stage in Berlin and Italy and off stage in the Mojave Desert and Death Valley, the film gives an experimental flavour of the unconventional lifestyle the group lived and the unique music that came out of it.

Synopsis

Marilyn, an extravagant dancer whose life is populated by mechanical toys that move spontaneously in her flat, meets men who hardly manage to deal with her unusual, dynamic personality and constantly disappoint her expectations.   A change in Marilyn's life occurs when a woman breaks into her private world.

Synopsis

Worst Case Scenario starts out as a series of still photography depicting daily life on a Viennese street corner. But as Sigmund Freud casts his long shadow across the city, the static world slowly and subtly comes to life and an increasingly improbable chain of events and relationships starts to emerge.

Synopsis

Yes is the story of a passionate love affair between an American woman (Joan Allen) and a Middle-Eastern man (Simon Abkarian) in which they confront some of the greatest conflicts of our generation - religious, political and sexual. Sam Neill plays the betrayed and betraying politician husband and Shirley Henderson a philosophical cleaner who witnesses the trail of dirt and heartbreak the lovers leave behind them, as they embark on a journey that takes them from London and Belfast to Beirut and Havana.    

Synopsis

You are a monkey. That's why you pick your nose, that's why you eat fruit and that's why you have those funny dreams about falling out of things.

Synopsis

An unsettling take on the ‘natural history’ of our contemporary urban environment, recreating three reported incidents where humans and ‘friendly’ animals interact badly – a postman kills a dog, a dog attacks a child, a horse kills a cyclist.

Synopsis

A quirky, horrific and erotic journey made on foot through the evolution of a contemporary male sexuality, from playful childhood friendship and past the puberty bits into a contented adult relationship.

Synopsis

The poetic youth is back and the decades fall away in this pastel pastoral. Roger McGough doesn’t cough once as the season sentimentally unfolds.

Synopsis

Sir Henry Wellcome (1853–1936) amassed one of the world’s largest museum collections, capturing human culture and history through medical eyes. The Phantom Museum uses animation to imaginatively ‘document’ this extraordinary assemblage and simultaneously reveal an extremely beautiful yet odd inner cosmos of things.