A modern satire on aristocracy, competition and extinction, drawn from a sixteenth century musical curiosity about a king killing for sport.
British vocal ensemble I Fagiolini sings Janequin’s La chasse (1537), complete with hunting sound effects, and plays a royal family determined to reign supreme.
A rumination on the cause and effect of climate change, using the medium of the collage film, and accompanied by a strong degree of musical counterpoint.
A fantasy-doc about love loss and deep sea mining, SOUNDINGS features two accounts of the future: one of corporate-technological progress and the other of species extinction.
Three-time Academy Award® nominee Johnny Depp plays celebrated war photographer W. Eugene Smith in a real life David vs Goliath story, pitting Smith against a powerful corporation responsible for poisoning the people of Minamata, Japan in 1971.
New York, 1971. W. Eugene Smith (Johnny Depp) is a celebrated photo-journalist and photo-essayist, but he feels devoid of inspiration. He is at such a low ebb he even considers suicide. Then a Japanese-American woman Aileen (Minami) shows up to convince him to come to the Japanese coastal city of Minamata, whose community has been ravaged by mercury poisoning, the result of decades of gross industrial negligence by Japan’s Chisso Corporation.
Eugene eventually agrees to go, with the reluctant and secret support of Life Magazine head Robert Hayes (Bill Nighy). With Aileen, Smith immerses himself in the community, documenting the people’s efforts to live with Minamata Disease and their passionate fight to achieve recognition and compensation from Chisso. It is a life-changing experience — one which brings Eugene redemption, love, new purpose and his greatest-ever photograph. A photograph that will change the world and provide desperately needed fuel to the fledgling environmental protection movement.
'Minamata' is a moving redemptive story of how one man’s powerful photograph impacted the world, yet in order to find it he had to open his heart.
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2020 - Berlinale Special - World premiere
Since the 1950's wireless signals have been banned in Green Bank to protect its radio telescope from interference. With no cell phones and no wifi, the small Appalachian town has attracted a number of people that claim to suffer from Electro Hypersensitivity seeking respite from the modern world. This is the story of the peculiar relationship between these people, the small town folk, and the massive radio telescope in the middle of it all, aimed at the sky above.
Official Selection IDFA 2020 - Competition for Mid-Length Documentary - World premiere
A monster film with no monsters. Inspired by the existence of taxonomies of monsters at the heart of Early Modern European science, the film explores and reinterprets a way of seeing the natural world that is almost impossible to imagine from today’s vantage point. Early Modern naturalists were guided by a logic in which scientific truths were discovered through visual analogy. The word ‘monster’ comes from the latin ‘monstrare’, meaning to show, to reveal, to demonstrate. A DEMONSTRATION picks up on these themes in a poetic exploration of the boundaries of sight and the metamorphosis of form.
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2020 - Berlinale Shorts - World premiere
An 8-minute animated short set over two time periods. In 1999 a boy becomes obsessed with the Y2K bug; In the distant future a girl is learning to be a priest in a religion based upon the ‘artifacts’ left behind by the boy. The people in the future speak in a partially understandable dialect of English that has evolved over time.
The cult of personality is terrifying, insane and at times hilarious. We are interested in how humans fabricate meaning and place their most deep-seated fears in the most unlikely of gods. The Year 2000 was simultaneously the beginning of the future, and the end of world. NEW YEAR is a humorous film that looks at humans struggling with their mortality, over thousands of years, through stories, ritual and religion.
One kilometre underneath the North Yorkshire coast, salt miners and research scientists work side by side at the edge of the biosphere. A young woman finds a new future in the darkness of this extreme environment.
A snapshot of an edgeland, Tilbury in Essex, during the months leading to the Brexit deadline in March 2019. The film moves back and forth between the individual, human-scale portraits of migration and the representation of the town’s economic activity.
Welcome to the age of cosmic radiation! THE PHANTOM MENACE compiles stories from the recent past of interaction with cosmic rays at ever descending altitudes. Planes crashing, computers malfunctioning and elections going haywire - these were just the prequel to the future.
Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2020 - Forum Expanded - World premiere
Combining behind-the-scenes political drama with the spirit of a sentimental screen romance,THE ATOM: A LOVE AFFAIR charts the social and political development of nuclear power - and our changing relationship with it – since the end of the Second World War.
Covering seven eventful decades and focusing particularly on events in the US, UK, France and Germany, the film reveals how the 1950s romantic fantasy of an atom-powered future developed into the stormy, on-off relationship whose drama continues to play out to this day.
It's a story of deeply felt convictions, political manoeuvering, blunders, crisis and reinvention. And it's told, as far as possible, firsthand, by the politicians, campaigners, scientists, engineers and executives directly involved in the fluctuating fortunes of the 'peaceful atom’.
