The Woman in the Fifth

Director: Pawel Pawlikowski

Year: 2004

Mona has just got hold of a brilliant moped that only cost a tenner. No engine but still dirt-cheap. She lives with her brother, Phil, who used to run a pub before he found God and poured away all the booze. Tamsin is rich, spoilt and trying to live a life of seductive decadence.   Mona and Tamsin meet on the moors, above their quiet Yorkshire village and begin an intense, unlikely friendship. While Tamsin is tragic and fantastical, Mona is rough and witty. Tamsin is quickly charmed and Mona is hooked. Both want to escape their lives but Phil wants to save them, and everybody else. Mona wants the old, dangerous Phil back; the brother that she loved, but Tamsin wants to see what it takes to break him. As the lives of the three characters converge, a sexually charged struggle between good and evil leads to a dramatic and shocking climax.  

Director: Pawel Pawlikowski

Year: 2001

A rare collaboration between BBC Films and BBC Documentaries, Last Resort is a moving love story which deals with the controversial issue of asylum seekers. Tanya, young and naîve, leaves Moscow with her street-wise 10-year-old son Artiom, to meet her English fiancé. But after he fails to turn up at the airport, Tanya and her son find themselves virtually imprisoned in a deserted seaside resort where all refugees are forced to live. They have no passports, no money, no rights. Desperate to escape a nightmarish world of misfits and no-hopers, Tanya forges an unusual alliance with amusement arcade manager Alfie, an alliance which soon develops into something more. But is he just another man who will let her down, or will Tanya and Artiom finally escape? 'Paul Pawlikowski was given free rein to select the subject matter and devise the drama. He used improvisation, documentary methods and a documentary-sized crew. The end result is high-quality, low-cost film-making that has a power and individuality rarely found in more conventional drama,' says producer Ruth Caleb.

Director: Anna Maguire, Kyle Greenberg

Year: 2026

What if you went on a holiday and the apocalypse happened? GALICIA! is a found-footage, hybrid-documentary following a couple through home video footage as they visit their friends at a winery in rural Spain and inadvertently capture the end of days. We live in a time where the sense of our impending mutually assured destruction is more real than it’s ever been. GALICIA! Takes the form of a holiday video - a document of a couple before - and after the great cataclysm. The film starts as something that feels unedited - an accidental video diary of an ordinary couple that feels somewhat ghostly as much as it is also pedestrian. As the film evolves and degrades, we are led to question the fragility of humanity, as well as its power to endure.