Black Country - A Film From England

Director: Louis Price

Year: 2020

An atmospheric journey into the heart of modern England. Filmmaker Louis Price weaves together scenes of everyday life within the Black Country in the West Midlands. An area once so industrialised the sky appeared black during the day, and red during the night, today the Black Country is a place of ghosts, existing in the aftermath of its industrial past. BLACK COUNTRY - A FILM FROM ENGLAND takes place entirely in one day, observing crematoriums, night clubs, UKIP pubs, living rooms and Council Chambers with a hallucinatory eye that presents no easy answers, or neat narrative resolves. Mixing a combination of industrial archive footage, experimental sound design (wax cylinder recordings, player piano, distorted 78 RPM records), with stripped back austere camera compositions and mysterious, mundane and sometimes unsettling subjects, a distorted postcard from a confused and increasingly indecipherable England.

Director: Hannah Berryman

Year: 2024

A landmark feature documentary about astronaut Eileen Collins, the first woman to pilot and command the Space Shuttle. Eileen’s incredible journey starts with her smalltown beginnings, sees her smash through many glass ceilings, and culminates in four dramatic space shuttle missions, the last being possibly the most dangerous and most important of them all. At its heart the film is the moving human drama of one family, where a mother’s extraordinary career takes us straight to the big philosophical question of what is the level of acceptable risk in human endeavour? This film celebrates Commander Collins’ trailblazing NASA career which opened the way for women to become spacecraft pilots and commanders, and proved a perfect riposte to a previous generation of male astronauts who thought there was no place for women to lead the way in space. Official Selection DOC NYC 2024 - World premiere Official Selection CPH:DOX 2025 - European premiere

Director: Barney Douglas

Year: 2026

The extraordinary story of Richard “Ric” O’Barry, once the world’s highest-paid dolphin trainer, now their most passionate defender, risking his life and liberty to free these remarkable creatures from captivity. In the 1960s, Ric was America’s leading dolphin trainer at the Miami Seaquarium and the celebrated trainer behind the hit TV series Flipper, whose smiling stars enchanted a generation. Everything changed after the apparent suicide of one of the show’s dolphins, Kathie - a moment that shattered his beliefs and set him on a radical path from insider to activist. For over 50 years, Ric has led a global campaign against dolphin captivity. As founder of Dolphin Project, he has risked arrest, injury, and personal loss to rescue dolphins and expose the industry’s darkest secrets. Both celebrated and criticised, he remains steadfast that every captive dolphin can be returned to the wild. Told through intimate family access, joyous underwater imagery, and covert filming, Ric’s mission has transformed a non-issue into a global movement. Now 85, he must ask: after a lifetime spent freeing others, can he finally set himself free?