Projects in categories: Documentary

Synopsis

Seventeen-year-old Ying Ling is away from home training to become a mortician at one of China’s largest funeral homes. Despite her fear of ghosts and dead bodies, she learns the spa rituals; cleaning and massaging the corpses while the grieving families look on.
Ying Ling finds solace from her macabre role through her playful banter with another of the young morticians. Together, they spend their time off talking about their hopes, fears and plans for the future.
As one of many rural-to-urban teenagers working to support her family, Ying Ling must immerse herself in the surreal and grinding world of China’s industrialisation of mortality. With intimate access and moments of humour, we follow Ying Ling as she learns about life while surrounded by death.
Official Selection Berlinale 2017 - Generation 14plus - World premiere

Synopsis

‘Bo’ Gritz is one of America’s highest decorated Vietnam veterans and the alleged real life inspiration behind Rambo. He also killed 400 people, turned against Washington and moved to the Nevada desert where he now sleeps with many weapons. Filmed over ten years using impressive visual material, Zimmerman’s portrait of Bo embodies contemporary American society in all its dizzying complexity and contradictions.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2017 - Experimenta Strand

Synopsis

An esoteric portrait of John 'Modge' Chancellor. An ex-tv star and red coat, living in the backwaters of the Suffolk countryside waiting for his time to shine once more.

Synopsis

Frank wants to be a world champion. His chosen discipline? Competitive stone skimming. A tosser for as long as he can remember, Frank believes that with discipline, dedication and purposeful practice, he's sure for victory.

Synopsis

SLEEPING IN PUBLIC is a new collaborative moving image commission, collaborating with writer Ellen Wilkinson for Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.
Captured at night in Bristol, the video work shows details of empty spaces: functional but overlooked parts of the city that in daylight would be populated by people working. In these dark images people are distantly present: a blurry figure passes behind a semi-opaque loading bay door; chairs wait for sitters to return; discarded paper cups are lit by the blue flashes of an emergency siren; someone wearing a high visibility jacket pauses in the centre of a car park.
The measured – perhaps weary – voice of the European narrator describes workers in a warehouse of artificial plants and flowers. Without a defined beginning and end, this looping video reflects the repetitive nature of the daily work that many of us do, depicting workplace hierarchies and the subtle ways in which people's behaviour is controlled.

Synopsis

A search for the truth behind a fishy tale.
Official Selection Sundance Film Festival 2017 - International Documentary Short Film Selection - World premiere

Synopsis

In 1977, immigration divides Britain. What happens when a punk fanzine challenges the status quo?
Official Selection Sundance Film Festival 2017 - International Documentary Short Film Selection - World premiere

Synopsis

On April 6, 2006, a young man named Halit Yozgat was shot and killed in a Kassel internet café. His murder was the ninth in a series of ten committed by a terrorist group called the National Socialist Underground (NSU) between 2000 and 2007. Andreas Temme, an employee of Hessen’s State Office for the Protection of the Constitution, was also present that same day. He claimed to have already left the café at the time of the crime.
Known for how they merge artistic and politic practice, the Forensic Architecture collective took on the murder of Halit Yozgat, precisely reconstructing the minutes before and after the crime in their film 77sqm_9:26min. Which elements of Andreas Temme’s statements are true and which are not is the central question of the film, which was shown for the first time at documenta 14 in Kassel. Witness statements are compared and sets of movements reconstructed in a replica of the internet café, while a digital simulation shows how long the smell of the gunshots remains in the air.
The conclusions that can be drawn from the research form a damning indictment of the investigative and judiciary authorities.
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2022 - Forum Special Fiktionsbescheinigung

Synopsis

A young filmmaker questions how he connects to his emotions, by talking to a stranger online who can’t feel any. This stranger (Robert) suffers from 'Alexithymia', which is a condition most simply described as ‘Emotional Blindness’, it’s the inability to identify and describe emotions in the self.

Synopsis

A crowd gathers until the early morning at a boozy London pub to watch the US presidential election. As dawn breaks, emotions escalate and the evening takes a turn for the worse.

Synopsis

A cinematic virtual reality experience about love, grief and reconciliation, between a human trafficking survivor and her father.
Official Selection Sundance Film Festival 2017 - VR for Good - World premiere

Synopsis

The shadows of screams climb beyond the hills. It has happened before. But this will be the last time. The last few sense it, withdrawing deep into the forest. They cry out into the black, as the shadows pass away, into the ground.