Leviathan Cycle, Episode 6: Ding Ling and Senait

Director: Shezad Dawood

Year: 2012

'Piercing Brightness' is a science fiction film directed by internationally acclaimed artist Shezad Dawood and set in Preston, Lancashire. The film looks to play on the border between mainstream narrative cinema and experimental film making and utilises science fiction as a backdrop from which to contest fixed notions of race, migration and identity. The film combines digital and analogue processes, high production values and low-fi aesthetics to tell a story through both its narrative and distortions of time brought about by experiments with the various formats used. It incorporates local institutions and people as extended cast, in a process whereby there is a slippage between fiction and document. Jiang and Shin, agents who have been dispatched from the home planets, land in a spaceship outside Preston, in the North of England. In the guise of a young Chinese boy and girl they are to re-establish contact and effect the retrieval of the 'Glorious 100', agents who were sent to this planet millennia ago to study and observe. Living through countless lives without any scope for return, many have become corrupted, forgetting their original purpose and slowly becoming influenced by and in turn influencing their adopted home.

Director: Marcus Flemmings

Year: 2026

In a near-future Britain that has deported all “non-British” people, a timid teenage boy hides the last Black woman in the country - then risks everything by bringing her to sing a well-known 2000’s RnB song at his 2000’s RnB-loving fascist father’s wake.

Director: Juan Pablo Bedoya

Year: 2026

Santo is a respected religious clockmaker and moneylender in his village. He exploits families in debt by using charm and kindness. When they cannot repay him, he persuades them to send their underage daughters to work as maids to pay off the debt. Ultimately, he sexually enslaves them and throws them out on the street when they become pregnant. His latest victim is Cira, an 11-year-old blackberry picker whose mother has pawned their home and land. After Santo's death, Maria Luisa, one of his victims, with the help of Fernando, his childhood friend and lawyer, fights for justice. After a long court battle, justice has finally been served, but not for everyone. Based on a real story.