Projects matching: Lynda Myer-Bennett, Clive Myer

Synopsis

All things buried will resurface.
Focused on the last weeks of the life of an archaeology professor, whose academic world is thrown into turmoil when forced to exhibit the 2000-year-old bog body he excavated with his former student and lover.
As places, events and his relationships appear to conspire in the analysis of the bog body, he concocts an ‘archaeology of the living’. Forced to confront painful home truths created by the love affair that tore his family apart, he enlists the help of a young security guard at the university who has his own peculiar reasons for an intense devotion to the body. Increasingly affected by his illness, his final address at the opening of the exhibition becomes the haunting soundtrack to a brutal murder, an event for which he, as an act of atonement, is prepared to pay the ultimate price.

Synopsis

A unique take on the world's most performed play The Cherry Orchard. The film explores Chekhov's play and Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author creating a new space between narrative and documentary.

Six actors are brought together in a country house over one weekend to put on an improvised version of The Cherry Orchard. They are pleased to see each other again and begin to explore the house and talk about old times. They chat about the play and what they feel needs to be done during this weekend but as they cast themselves as suitable characters cracks begin to appear. They discuss the dramatic themes - longing for things past, decay, regret, loss, spite and jealousy which slowly and imperceptibly begin to take over the actors and their characters. Little do the actors realise they will be consumed by the play both as the characters, over which they argue, bitch, make alliances and betrayals, and as themselves, loving, jealous, spiteful, bullying human beings. What begins as a light-hearted weekend of theatrical fun gradually turns into a self-doubting and destructive scenario.
As they gather in the garden to make their theatrical entrance will they ever be able to be friends again?