Vera Simmonds

The revelation of a top-secret British surveillance programme brings down the dominoes in a dark and analytical film about technology, rights and structural racism – and about a man with the courage to speak out.

Young birdwatchers Mya and Arjun are coming of age in a time of climate chaos. Even if hey feel isolated and judged, they are determined to stand up for what they believe in.

Marwan Barghouti, often described as the ‘Palestinian Nelson Mandela’, is serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison. This is his story.

Tracing her journey from Australia to the UK, director Joanna Callaghan weaves together her own personal history with a wider story of colonisation, migration and the role of geography in identity. Framed by a road trip through Australia, Callaghan uses a diverse range of recorded media to explore her relationship with the country, her family and her own creative life. Shaping this rich mix of archive material, including family photos, home movies and extracts from her own films and photography, Record builds to reveal a lifetime’s journey.

Some time after her death, film director Jill Craigie (1911- 99), re-opens an old suitcase, prompting memories of the extraordinary life and loves of this forceful, charismatic woman, whose work has been long neglected. Craigie was one of the first women to direct documentaries. Working outside the British Documentary Movement in the 1940s and early 1950s, her films such as To Be Woman (1951), on equal pay, and Out of Chaos (1944), the first film about artists at work, featuring Henry Moore and Paul Nash, tackled new subjects for the cinema through a unique blend of drama, polemic and humour. Independent Miss Craigie uses the director’s unseen papers, and her films, to reveal her energetic struggles to get her radical projects made and distributed, including her last one, on the Yugoslav conflict, made when she was 83, with her husband, former Labour leader, Michael Foot.

In a small community of Montana, between green valleys and wild mountains, Thaddeus, a Cheyenne native, and Nanci, a non-native woman, prepare their wedding. While we get to know them, we realize that what seems to be an everyday affair appears as a difficult path of reconciliation and cultural confrontations deeply rooted in the history of the United States of America.

Mathew Trewella is a lad adrift, living in the shadow of his brother Pete; fishermen in a small Cornish village. Banned from every pub, his options have run out. Whilst singing to himself at sea on Pete’s fishing trawler, Mathew finds a strange beast: unconscious, clearly female and part human, in the net. Seeing the chance to exploit this, the brothers smuggle it to the local aquarium and, roping in Pete’s wife Nessa, they debate what to do.

Tells in parallel, the story of two Mexican brothers that want to go back to the United States after being deported for life, and the story of an American woman who lost her house and today believes she can get it back through Trump’s promises. Their journeys take them on road trips to meet with their past and with relatives who they believe can help them achieve their dreams. Immigration has been shown in many ways, but it has never been presented through the lives of Mexicans and Americans who live similar situations due to poverty and lack of family structure. To achieve a dream you first need to know the name of the dream.

JIMMY hates musicals. When EUGENIUS – the cosmically charged, all-singing, all-dancing musical Godfather – tap dances into Jimmy’s tedium, Jimmy is swept off to a magical theatre realm and told he is destined to become the Greatest Musical Star of all time! But Jimmy’s aversion to the melodic art runs far deeper than mere dislike. In order to save the world from a tuneless future, Jimmy is forced to confront a buried childhood trauma… MUSICAL STAR! is a charming, entertaining comedy for everyone who ever loved, or hated musicals. A tale of magic, optimism and… childhood trauma, MUSICAL STAR! dares to ask the question, When everything’s so crappy what’s wrong with being happy?