Promisedland™

Director: Frank Eli Martin

Year: 2024

In 1985, the Irish village of Ballinspittle was the site of a mass visionary experience. Worshippers at the local grotto saw the statue of Mary move. Almost forty years later, a handful of local devotees remain, including the statue’s dutiful caretaker Patrick Joseph Simms. Here, the film documents both the mystical landscape of rural Irish Catholicism and a terrible darkness beneath its surface. The film uses a non-realist form and style in order to depict the transcendent experience of its subjects. In so doing, it attempts to offer a credibility to the experience of the film’s participants, whose voices have been deliberately dismissed by the institution that oversees their faith. Official Selection Uppsala Short Film Festival 2024

Director: Christina D. Bartson

Year: 2027

An all-archival film which tells the story of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline - one of the most ambitious energy projects of the 21st Century - and the scientists, activists, and farmers that came close to stopping it. Part ghost story, part road trip film, the feature documentary examines how the ghosts of the empire haunt the present, as the world burns.

Director: Peter Treherne

Year: 2026

MATTER OF BRITAIN was an English country village’s performance of the Holy Grail myth. In that myth, King Arthur’s knights quest for the Holy Grail in order to heal their wasted land. The performance took place over 12 months from 2023 to 2024 in multiple locations across the parish of Mayfield, East Sussex. Over 300 members of the community took part as questing knights, angelic choirs, guiding anchorites and tempting devils. The performance was documented and subsequently made into an ethnographic fantasy that has screened at the Museum of Modern Art, CPH:DOX, Cinéma du Réel and Open City Documentary Film Festival. The work was supported by an Arts Council England Project Grant, the Lund Trust, High Weald AONB, East Sussex Arts Partnership, the University of Reading and the Museum of English Rural Life.