Paws for Thought

Director: Rehana Rose

Year: 2018

An intimate portrait of those dealing with their dead, supported during the ritual of care after death by a team of women who are ‘giving death back to the people’. For nearly twenty years, a small team of women in Brighton have been changing the way people look after their dead. Supporting them to participate during the ritual of care after death and empowering all regardless of limited finances. Cara is passionate and believes in power to the people, challenging many of the accepted, traditional and often secretive ways of corporate funeral directors. This relatively unknown work is part of an emerging movement confronting the way death is approached in modern Britain. With extraordinary access, we follow three groups of people from the point of death of their loved one through to the ceremony.

Director: Julia Fry

Year:

Using ideas from Carl Jung - exploring and accepting the inner world, Carolyn Abbate - analysis of dissonance to find the narrative voice - and Hilde Lindemann Nelson - using narrative to repair damaged identity, I filmed my process of creating puppets and recorded some of the thoughts that arose as I made them. I utilised emergent practice in the filmmaking, which meant letting go of preconceived ideas to let narrative arise in the moment. I wanted my puppets to unite, rather than fight in the traditional Punch and Judy manner.

Director: Virginia Heath

Year: 2027

A feminist musical documentary, an ethical telling of a true-crime story. An anti-true-crime documentary, the film is a bold, cinematic portrayal of a unique Irish singer-song writer Keeley Moss. Every song Keeley writes and performs celebrates the life of, and demands justice for, Inga Maria Hauser, a young German backpacker, sexually assaulted and murdered in Northern Ireland in 1988. As the facts of Inga Maria's case migrate from Keeley's meticulous blog into her songs, the Director ‘investigates the investigator’ to capture Keeley's fever dream of the intense week of adolescent freedom Inga Maria enjoyed, before she became a 'murder victim'. Through the prism of the Director's feminist gaze, and the actress-cast-as-Inga, Keeley and Inga Maria's personas blur, a rejection of the murder porn audiences are so fatigued by. Through the empathy the Director clearly feels for Keeley’s difficult adolescence and her subsequent obsessive mission, we feel the devastating impact Inga Maria's violent death had on two generations of her family and their anguish at the continuing lack of justice. Perhaps most remarkable of all, we discover the unexpected and profound gifts that Inga Maria has rewarded Keeley's dedication with.