Violet City

Director: John Maxwell

Year: 2020

LIME STREET combines archive footage, documentary, animation and the performance film of COSTA Book Award nominated Jeff Young's play BRIGHT PHOENIX starring Cathy Tyson (Mona Lisa). It explores how changing, sanitising and eradicating the urban landscape distinct to a city, notably the now demolished Futurist Cinema in Liverpool that is featured in BRIGHT PHOENIX, leads to a degradation of culture and a caustic erosion with the past. How do places recall culture and society in a unique way? How do they offer a physical, organic link to new generations? How are they live stages for culture to grow? This is a city that can’t be found in a guidebook, a culture that lives in the walls of places like the Futurist Cinema. When it is torn down, the future vanishes. LIME STREET blends an elegiac play with an investigative documentary, ergo the recent arrest of city Mayor Joe Anderson and current investigation into bribery charges surrounding property development. In an age where city planning and regeneration are so relevant to the present and future of cities, this project explores how retaining and restoring places means so much more than nostalgia.

Director: Stuart St Paul

Year: 1998

In nineteenth century rural England, a German hussar serving with King George III's personal cavalry, Matthaus Singer, falls madly in love with Frances Groves, the only daughter of a West Country solicitor. Based on the short story 'The Melancholy Hussar' by Thomas Hardy

Director: Sara Nourizadeh

Year: 2026

Set in a mosque waiting room in 1980s South Wales, and inspired by the true story of writer-director Sara Nourizadeh's parents, a young couple whose relationship crossed boundaries of culture, faith and expectation. At a time when Iranian politics dominated UK headlines and shaped public attitudes, a Welsh woman and her Iranian fiancé prepare for an Islamic conversion ceremony – a requirement they must fulfil if they are to marry. What follows is a quietly charged and emotionally intimate portrait of two people trying to navigate a moment that is both deeply personal and subtly political. As they wait for the ceremony to begin, small details – a trembling hand, a whispered joke, a fleeting moment of doubt – reveal the emotional stakes beneath the surface. Their conversation dances between humour and tension, affection and uncertainty, reflecting the push and pull of family pressures, cultural misunderstandings, and their own hopes for the future. Authentic VHS archive footage of the real couple is interwoven within this scripted drama, grounding the film in lived experience and offering an unexpectedly tender glimpse into the decades that followed.