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: Helen Lyons-Curran

Year: 2026

A woman's New Year's Eve plans are thrown off course in a taut and tense thriller.

Director: Daniel Romero

Year: 2026

When Basque woman, Ane (20), is kidnapped by a male taxi driver, she wakes up in a mysterious house in the countryside and discovers that the three other women being held captive act as the kidnapper’s ‘daughters’, with the eldest ‘daughter’ released back into society each time a new daughter is brought into the house. Terrified, Ane must convince the other ‘daughters’ to escape, but they have other plans.