Projects in categories: Documentary

Synopsis

Filmed over four years, Personal Best follows up-and-coming British sprinters on their journey from the grassroots of athletics to the international stage. The film is both a gripping portrait of the athletes in training and competition, and a deeply personal account of their lives unfolding – revealing victory, defeat, agony, ecstasy and the simple trials of growing up. On the eve of the 2012 Olympics, this film tells the stories of Britain’s young sprinters as they strive towards their dreams. This is an inspiring but genuine portrait of Britain’s youth and a penetrating study of the art of sprinting, peeling back the layers so we can finally understand everything it means to them as they are on the start-line waiting for the gun to fire.

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Swandown is a travelogue and odyssey of Olympian ambition. A poetic film-diary about encounter and culture. It is also an endurance test and pedal-marathon. Andrew Kötting (the filmmaker) and Iain Sinclair (the writer) pedal a plastic swan-shaped pedalo from the seaside in Hastings to Hackney in East London, via the English inland waterways. This action may, in part be seen as an act of ‘dada performance’ or as a response to the spirit of Olympic diversity and ambition. The journey and all that it entails is documented on both film and video and presented as a 90-minute feature length experimental documentary.

Synopsis

In the middle of an industrial wasteland in South East London lies a piece of untold comedy history, the Tunnel Club. A long-gone hive for Britain's wildest acts: a comedian and a notorious heckler tell its story and that of its infamous compere, unsung 'godfather of alternative comedy,' Malcolm Hardee.

Synopsis

In Trashed, Jeremy Irons sets out to discover the extent and effects of the global waste problem, as he travels around the world to beautiful destinations tainted by pollution. This meticulous, brave investigative journey takes him (and us) from skepticism to sorrow and from horror to hope. The beauty of our planet from space forms a violent contrast to the scenes of human detritus across the globe. Vast landscaped in China are covered in tons of rubbish. The wide waters of the Ciliwung River in Indonesia are now barely visible under a never-ending tide of plastic. Children swim among leaking bags; mothers wash in the sewage-filled supply. Each year, we now throw away fifty-eight billion disposable cups, billions of plastic bags, 200 billion liters of water bottles, billions of tons of household waste, toxic waste and e-waste.

Synopsis

AFTER is a film about contemporary life in Auschwitz. In an observation from dusk till dawn, it portrays the theatre of everyday life around the grim confines and captures the energies and activities of a world fascinated by this former concentration camp.

Synopsis

Edward Greenfield, is a music critic and above all, music lover, who has chronicled classical music and opera for the past sixty years, for The Guardian, where he was chief music critic from 1977 to 1993, Gramophone Magazine and BBC radio. He was awarded an OBE in 1994.

Synopsis

Water, sunlight, breathing and skin – this is a submersion into the joy of sea swimming by night and by day. A series of moving portraits and interviews held exclusively in the sea off the coast of Hastings in the South East.

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Astronomer Grant Miller is obsessed with looking for earth-like planets in distant solar systems. Not only does he think that life is possible outside of our solar system, he believes that a discovery will be made in his own lifetime.

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"Remembering John Halas" evaluates the legacy of the Jewish-Hungarian emigre who became the father of British Animation. John’s daughter, Vivien, tries to pick away at the legend and uncover his true nature by looking for clues in his films and by talking to those who liked or merely respected him.

Synopsis

Luke Fowler’s collage film about R.D. Laing, who spearheaded the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s, weaves archival material with his own filmic observations. For Laing normality meant adjusting ourselves to the mystification of an alienating world.

Synopsis

“I’m trusted with a pair of scissors and I’m in here for murder”. Prison life in the build up to the annual Scottish Prison Service hairdressing competition. Winning the coveted prize is the ultimate goal, but Francis, the current champion has other objectives on his mind. We hear dreams and aspirations of some of Scotland’s most dangerous prisoners turning their lives around through cutting the hair of fellow inmates on a daily basis. “10 minutes in here is like 10 minutes outside jail” We discover how hairdressing is helping many of Scotland’s prisoners come to terms with their crimes and preparing them for life outside.

Synopsis

Schiller said there is a watcher at the gate of the mind, and it is the watcher that prevents creativity, because creativity and insanity are almost the same thing. The ventriloquist’s doll can kill off the watcher of the mind allowing access to spontaneity and imagination. Acclaimed ventriloquist Nina Conti, takes the bereaved puppets of her mentor and erstwhile lover Ken Campbell on a pilgrimage to 'Venthaven', the resting place for puppets of dead ventriloquists. She gets to know her traveling partners along the way, and through them deconstructs both herself and her lost love in this ventriloquial docu-mocumentary requiem.