XY Chelsea

Director: Tim Travers Hawkins

Year: 2010

Asylum seekers in indefinite detention around the UK leave messages in vain on an abandoned answerphone in the basement of a government ministry.   They are invisible to the outside world; yet exist under a regime of constant surveillance. Their past traumas return in their dreams and erupt in hallucinations that fill them with panic and fear.   With the threat of deportation ever present, they describe their own psychological deterioration as they pass the days in an unlimited confinement that strips their lives of all certainty. Their words trigger dark, visceral images inside the static and void of the phone line.

Director: Tim Travers Hawkins

Year: 2013

Animated documentary featuring the voices of children locked up in immigration detention centres around the world. Governments routinely deny media access to these facilities so the voices of children detained in Australia, Greece, South Africa and USA were recorded secretly over the phone and reveal their hidden suffering.

Director: Eamon Bourke

Year: 2026

Filmmaker Eamon Bourke lost his mother, Sue, when he was three and has no memory of her. When his father decides to sell the remote Lake District home where she died, Eamon returns with his camera to document the house and its clearing. Among Sue’s belongings - diaries, poems, photographs and tapes - he discovers a box of damaged cassette recordings. After painstakingly repairing them, he uncovers something extraordinary: his mother’s voice. Through these intimate audio diaries, Sue speaks candidly about motherhood, sings to her children, and captures fleeting family moments Eamon never knew. One final tape records her describing the onset of hepatitis, days before she fell into a coma and died in 1983. Another, more haunting still, features three-year-old Eamon calling out to his unconscious mother in hospital, in a desperate attempt to bring her back. As Eamon pieces together this archive, he confronts the enduring impact of early loss, speaking with his father and sisters while retracing the emotional landscape of his childhood. Set against the vast beauty of the Lake District, a deeply personal exploration of grief, memory and love - an attempt to recover what was lost, and to finally say goodbye.