Venus Drowning

Director: Andrew Parkinson

Year: 1999

Mark, a botanist, is bitten by a sick woman while on a field trip. He is infected with a virus that makes him crave fresh human meat. On returning to London, he takes a new flat and lives a life of isolation where he can satisfy his need for flesh. Repulsed by his own violent behaviour, he takes a series of victims, eats them, and disposes of their remains as best he can. As his illness progresses he becomes weaker and more disorientated. His girlfriend Sarah is shattered by his vanishing, but slowly rebuilds her life with the support of friends. Mark is obsessed with Sarah and determined to see her again. He anaesthetises and kidnaps her, taking her back to his new flat. He starts to hallucinate and aware of his own volatile condition, returns her safely to live her new life. He is getting weaker, and after dragging the body of one of his victims, his leg breaks. Unable to seek medical help he screws a metal plate onto the side of his broken leg. The boundaries between reality and his increasingly disturbing hallucinations become more blurred. The flesh on his face is starting to ulcerate. He can no longer leave the flat. While masturbating, his decaying penis falls off in his hand. All that remains is to attempt as dignified a death as possible.

Director: Precious Wura Alabi

Year: 2026

A stoic pharmacist faces a tumultuous 11-hour shift at his demanding job. While he successfully juggles an assorted conveyor-belt of patient’s problems, he struggles in desperate slithers of time to fight off the weight of his own festering issues.

Director: Jason Bradbury

Year:

Long-distance lorry driver Kieran has built his life around control. He keeps emotional risk at arm's length, seeking anonymous hook ups in laybys where connection is never part of the deal. Until Aidan emerges from the treeline, volatile and unnervingly intense. Kieran, convinced he's in control, ignores every warning sign until the police arrive and the carefully constructed boundaries of his life begin to collapse. LAYBY is a queer psychosexual thriller about collision between control and connection. Set over one night in a remote Scottish layby, it is a story about the need for intimacy and how far we'll go into the dark to find it.