Over

Director: Jörn Threlfall

Year: 1998

In a Kansas City motel, an independent film crew is shooting a sequence on closed-circuit TV which explores the thin divide between intimacy and violence. All day long, the motel's boss stares drunkenly at surveillance monitors showing all the activity in the building. The film scene sparks off very different reactions in the boss and in a young woman who works at the motel. Later, confusion over real and 'fabricated' surveillance tapes exposes an unspeakable threat to the young woman. Ted, the film's director, realises too late the reality of the danger she is in. Reality and fiction come into conflict, and the characters are forced to test their abilities to deal with the complexities of emotional crisis. The film explores the notion that all forms of surveillance used in contemporary society fracture people's identities, creating electronic and dislocated personalities that exist and operate autonomously from the individual. The film examines the consequences of our increasing obsession with the 'need to know', and explores how effortlessly technology and surveillance have become accepted as an invisible presence that provides us with a vision of reality or 'technological truth'. How far removed are we from being able to communicate innocently and emotionally, from being able simply to 'touch' or connect with one another, without the pervasive need to dissect and evaluate?

Director: Kemi-Bo Miller Jacobs

Year: 2026

Mary, a young mixed-race librarian, becomes convinced that a neighbour’s St George’s Cross is connected to her growing anxiety and disrupted sleep. As her unease intensifies, she struggles to distinguish reality from perception and must find the courage to speak up before she begins to unravel.

Director: Mohammed Sawwaf, Michael Winterbottom

Year: 2027

GAZA YEAR ZERO tells the story of 13 year old Aboud and his family as they struggle to survive in Gaza during the war.