Hard Shoulder

Director: Nicholas David Lean

Year: 2012

Carl Foster, a work obsessed man, reluctantly agrees to a weekend away with his disgruntled wife and disruptive children - it’s as much as he can do to muster any kind of enthusiasm for the few days he must endure in their company. Their constant bickering finally takes its toll on Carl when they are passed, on a deserted country road, by a convoy of ‘carnival types’, who, by mischief or accident, cause Carl to swerve off the road. With rage descending Carl gets into heated exchange with the travellers. Taking an enforced stop hours later, in a small layby, the family are again affronted as their stationary vehicle is rammed by an unseen assailant in a large truck. Dazed by the impact they wake, bound and gagged, within the dreary confines of an abandoned roadside diner, with, seemingly, the same carnival types now their abductors and antagonists. As the gang demeans, insults, and tortures each of their captives in turn, it falls to Carl to free his family from their predicament. But not everything is as it seems, their environment not as tortuous as they imagined, and Carl not all that he would have us believe.

Director: Antonia Campbell-Hughes

Year: 2026

In Geneva's wealthy international circles, privileged expatriates navigate their luxurious lives while dealing with personal dramas and hidden secrets.

Director: Blaize Mott

Year: 2026

Donald, a lonely young man desperate to improve his dating life, hires a manipulative pick-up artist, Charles, to teach him how to meet and attract women. Over the course of one night in London, Donald is pulled into a world of performance, pressure and control, where confidence becomes coercion and desire begins to blur with power. What began as a harmless lesson on love transforms into a night where the methods he is instructed to use to achieve his goal are far darker than he could have ever imagined.