Ben Hopkins

Imdb:
A filmmaker from England is hired to direct an epic production in the Caucasus region of Europe.Read More »

synopsis – AMG:
Director of award-winning short films Ben Hopkins embarked on this ambitious feature project with Robert Jones, the producer of The Usual Suspects. The screenplay is inspired by Central European folklore, spaghetti Westerns and industrial history. But the film, which runs like a fable, has its roots in folktales rather than history. It is the end of the 19th century and progress has arrived in Silesia. Travelers do not stop at the town anymore because the railway track is laid past the small settlement. Incomes have dropped, and so has the number of inhabitants. Noah Taylor plays Simon, a ‘holy fool’ of sorts, persecuted by fellow villagers who hold him responsible for everything from the failure of the crops to the milk going sour. Read More »

Mihram is a small time Turkish black marketeer who gambles and drinks too much. Something that bothers both him and his wife, Elif. He wants to better his life and when he hears about the enormous amount of cell phones being sold, he wants to enter that market. For this, he needs money and when the local doctor asks him to get medicine from Azerbaijan for the sick children, he sets out to get the medicine, aided by his crotchety elderly uncle Fazil. (IMDb)Read More »

A European director is commissioned to make a documentary about Istanbul. He starts to film its everyday life – but soon becomes drawn to the darker, more mysterious side of the city – its past, its secrets, its ghosts. Gradually he succumbs to obsession.Read More »

Quote:
A sadly neglected gem of British Cinema, this stunningly inventive film takes in German Expressionism, the pop promo, the docudrama and film noir. And that’s just for starters. The story of a mysterious man who creates chaos and anarchy in his wake, this has buckets of sly humour and a pleasingly dark edge. With brilliant performances from Thomas Fisher and Ian McNeice, this is an astounding reminder that UK cinema is much more than gangsters and girls in corsets.Read More »

portrait of the Kirghiz tribe, living a quasi-Iron Age existence in one of the remotest places on earth.

37 Uses For A Dead Sheep is a documentary with a sense of humour. However, as he recounts the eventful history of Central Asian tribe the Pamir Kirghiz, director Ben Hopkins stays on the right side of Borat-style ethnic mockery, treating his subjects with affection and esteem. He also turns a few of them into film stars in a range of reconstructions that entertainingly reveal the community’s journey over the last century or so.

Evocative title, that. Could the film itself possibly match it? Director Ben Hopkins finds the Pamir Kirghiz, a small Central-Asian tribe now living in eastern Turkey, and works together with them to craft a fleet-footed, intriguingly pomo documentary about this little-known group of nomads. Hopkins uses the tribes people to reenact moments from their history (shot in grainy 16mm), then shoots himself shooting them, then interviews them about it, while intercutting it all with images of their life today, in a village the Turkish government pretty much settled just for them. Oh yeah, there’s also a framing device in which the director talks to an old Kirghiz man about—you guessed it—all the things they can do with a dead sheep. It’s all very meta, but once Hopkins reveals the odd backstory of this people, pingponging between the Great Powers (Russia, China, the U.K.) who controlled their homeland at various times, it’s hard to think of a more appropriate approach to this material. The result is an inventive look at some truly unwitting victims of history’s relentless, unforgiving march.Read More »