The White Room

Director: James Erskine

Year: 2024

Genre-busting tale of how unemployed amateur cyclist, Bryan Allen, and heavily in debt father-of-three, Paul MacCready, together with a rag-tag team of neuro-diverse outliers, set out on a death-defying and madcap quest to untangle the mystery of human powered flight and in doing so win the most coveted prize in aviation. <br /> Built from a remarkable trove of recently discovered 16mm footage along with an arsenal of innovative techniques, this uplifting story of ingenuity, courage and determination, challenges us to question the assumptions we make about about society’s outliers and reminds us of how the stories we tell can help us to understand and perhaps change the world.

Director: James Erskine

Year: 2019

Billie Holiday one ofthe greatest voices of all time, a woman of breath-taking talent and globalpopularity, was throughout her short life a figure of controversy - a blackwoman in a white man’s world, a victim and a rebel whose performances and recordings of the protest song "Strange Fruit" earned her powerful enemies. She was also an enigma, her telling of her own life story a mix of half truths and free-form improvisations.<br /> In the late1960s journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl set out to write the definitive biographyof Billie. Over the next decade, she tracked down and tape-recorded interviews with the extraordinary characters that populated the iconic singer’s short, tumultuous life. Raw, emotional and brutally honest, these incredible testimonies ranged from musical greats like Charles Mingus, Tony Bennett, Sylvia Syms and Count Basie to her cousin, schoolfriends, lovers, lawyers, pimps and even the FBI agents who arrested her. But Linda’s book was never finished and the tapes unplayed – until now.<br /> With unprecedented and exclusive access to Linda's astonishing 200 hours of never-before-heard interviews, BILLIE showcases an American legend, capturing her depths andcomplexity through the voices of those who knew her best. Painstakingly restored with footage and stills colourized by one of the leading colour artists, it is an arresting and powerful tale of one of the greatest singers who ever lived, and of Linda Lipnack Kuehl, the woman who would sacrifice her life intrying to tell it.<br /> Official Selection Telluride Film Festival 2019 - World premiere

Director: James Erskine

Year: 2018

A searing documentary of a lost cultural icon. A story of art, sport, sexuality, and rebellion. <br /> Watch any figure skating and it falls into two camps: before and after John Curry. From what was a macho, technical sport whose judges punished deviation, blossomed – through John Curry’s stubborn beauty – ice-dancing. <br /> After winning gold at the Winter Olympics for a rebelliously balletic routine, audiences and reviewers alike were enthralled by his genius. But Curry’s story is about more than skating. On the night of the final, Curry became the first openly gay Olympian at a time when homosexuality was barely legal. From bullying and prejudice, to relief in the gay underworld, to his untimely death from AIDS, Curry’s story dovetails with the experiences of a generation.<br /> This is the story of a man whose body was a battleground. From love affairs, to violence in sex clubs, to its ‘unmanly’ elegance on the ice, every act was rebellion. John Curry was no activist, but an artist expressing his authentic self – yet in a world where his existence was taboo, his life was unavoidably political.<br /> Official Selection CPH:DOX 2018 - International premiere