The Ballad of Shirley Collins

Director: Rob Curry, Tim Plester

Year: 2020

In 1959 the legendary ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax set out on a road trip through The Southern States. Recently returned from years of voluntary exile during the McCarthy era, his goal was to collect a definitive cross-section of traditional American roots music, using prototype stereo tape-recorder. This was a world on the cusp of monumental change, the recordings that Lomax made serve as both a peerless collection of traditional music and a social document of the times. 60 years on, SOUTHERN JOURNEY REVISITED follows the route that Lomax previously traversed - searching out the remaining echoes of the recordings he made along the way. Alongside the music, the documentary takes the pulse of a nation, surveying what has and has not changed, for good and for bad, in the 6 decades since Lomax trod the self-same path. Inspired partly by the negative stereotypes of the South that predominate both in Europe and the rest of America, the filmmakers set out to see for themselves if those stereotypes held any water. What emerges is a rich and varied tapestry that gives the lie to any reductive theories about the people and politics of the land that lies “Away, Away, Away Down South”.

Director: Rob Curry, Tim Plester

Year: 2014

A field-recorded encounter with some of the more eccentric folk rituals of the Norfolk Broads - as seen through the eyes of one indigenous storyteller.

Director: Hannah Berryman

Year: 2024

A landmark feature documentary about astronaut Eileen Collins, the first woman to pilot and command the Space Shuttle.<br /> Eileen’s incredible journey starts with her smalltown beginnings, sees her smash through many glass ceilings, and culminates in four dramatic space shuttle missions, the last being possibly the most dangerous and most important of them all.<br /> At its heart the film is the moving human drama of one family, where a mother’s extraordinary career takes us straight to the big philosophical question of what is the level of acceptable risk in human endeavour? <br /> This film celebrates Commander Collins’ trailblazing NASA career which opened the way for women to become spacecraft pilots and commanders, and proved a perfect riposte to a previous generation of male astronauts who thought there was no place for women to lead the way in space. <br /> Official Selection DOC NYC 2024 - World premiere<br /> Official Selection CPH:DOX 2025 - European premiere