2011-2020

Our first film was Pina, the documentary on contemporary dancing directed by Wim Wenders. I’m so glad to have chosen Wim over Bono, though, because Pina is an impressive and audaciously original piece of filmmaking.
Pina is an essay on the life and work of renowned choreographer Pina Bausch. Pina appears in some archival footage, and several members of her dance troupe testify to her ingenuity and artistic inspiration. The spirit of Pina, however, lives on in her dances: the film offers four of Bausch’s famed dances in their entirety, but dispersed and intercut throughout the film. The opening dance, The Rite of Spring, is a mesmerizing and penetrating ballet through a field of earth. The film’s hindrance may be that the first number is the strongest, but all four dances are sharp and provocative, and they alternate between soundstages and exterior settings.Read More »

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Abandoned by his father, a young boy is left in the hands of an unqualified childcare provider.

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The Kid with a Bike (French: Le Gamin au vélo) is a 2011 drama film written and directed by the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, starring Cécile de France and Thomas Doret. Set in Seraing, it tells the story of an 11-year-old boy who turns to a woman after his father has abandoned him.[1] The film was produced through companies in Belgium, France and Italy. While it does not deviate from the naturalistic style of the Dardenne brothers’ earlier works, a brighter aesthetic than usual was employed, and the screenplay had a structure inspired by fairytales. Unusually for a film by the directors it also uses music. It premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and won the festival’s Grand Prix.Read More »

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Channel 4 – 26 May 2011

Colin Blanchard, Vanessa George, Angela Allen, Tracy Lyons and Tracey Dawber provoked widespread revulsion and made international headlines after their sexual offences against children came to light in 2009.

With unique access to the police investigation, Cutting Edge is the first film to take an in-depth forensic look at this criminal web, detailing how it operated, and what motivated the five people within it.

This carefully crafted, sensitive and revealing documentary uses police interviews with the offenders, and first-hand testimonies from family members of the offenders and the parents of a possible victim.Read More »

Ashes contemplates love, pleasure, and the destruction of memory. The surroundings of everyday life are shared with extreme intimacy. For Apichatpong, Thailand, while full of beauty, is slowly collapsing into darkness.

“King Kong rarely barked. She had been with us since she was three months old. Every night she slept and looked around in her dreams.

We thought that our spirits were enriched by the fertile soil and the greenest leaves and the rarest insects and the abundance of humility. But came a day in March we woke up from our dream. The sky wept ashes. The rotten ground trembled as baby worms rose to taste the gray snow. Across the mountains the light of devotion shone and blinded our souls. The darkness was so bright we wept and shouted in silence. And we woke up again, and again.Read More »

Slow Action is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film which exists somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction. Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography – the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat – to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years; the sea level rising to absurd heights, creating hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies.

Slow Action is filmed at different sites across the globe: Lanzarote – a beautiful strange island known for its beach resorts yet one of the driest places on the planet, full of dead volcanoes and strange architecture; Gunkanjima – an island off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, a deserted city built on a rock, once home to thousands of families mining its rich coal reserves; Tuvalu – one of the smallest countries in the world, with tiny strips of land barely above sea level in the middle of the Pacific; and Somerset – an as yet to be discovered island and its various clades.Read More »

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Roman, played by Thomas Schubert, is a 19-year-old man who has known little else than prison walls. He is serving time for murder, but is at the end of his sentence. Parole may be offered if he can hold down a job in the real world. He has tried many different vocations, but has never lasted longer than a day. With one last attempt before his hearing Roman takes on a job at an undertakers. Could this be the one that helps him find his place in society?Read More »

Australia’s most infamous crime story.

Sixteen-year-old Jamie lives with his mother, Elizabeth, and two younger brothers, Alex and Nicholas, in a housing trust home in Adelaide’s northern suburbs. Their home is but one of many sun-starved houses crammed together to cater for a disenfranchised society.

Jamie longs for an escape from the violence and hopelessness that surrounds him and his salvation arrives in the form of John, a charismatic man who unexpectedly comes to his aid.

As John spends more and more time with Jamie’s family, Elizabeth and her boys begin to experience a stability and sense of family that they have never known.Read More »

Patience (After Sebald) is a multi-layered film essay on landscape, art, history, life and loss by the acclaimed documentary film-maker Grant Gee. It is an exploration of the work and influence of German writer WG Sebald (1944 – 2001), told via a long walk through coastal East Anglia tracking his most famous book The Rings of Saturn. The book mixed history, travelogue, memoir, meditation, fiction and images to explore the personal, public and often overlooked histories of Suffolk.

Sebald has profoundly influenced some of today’s leading writers, thinkers and artists. Some of these – interviewed for the film include Adam Philips, Robert Macfarlane, Rick Moody and Tacita Dean.Read More »

Plot / Synopsis

Tul is about to see his world turned upside down. When we first meet him, he’s been sent a package of photos and data, which he examines and then promptly puts through the shredder. He shaves his head, dons a monk’s robes, and walks onto the gated estate belonging to the man in the photos. Tul then takes a pistol and fires a bullet into the man’s neck. More shots are fired, one of them hitting Tul in the head. Everything turns black. When Tul wakes up three months later, all that he sees is inverted. Is it some bizarre brain injury, or some form of karmic retribution? In the disorienting world of Headshot, such questions linger, and draw us closer to its violence and mystery.Read More »