Six poems written by six young prisoners animated to tell their stories, thoughts, fears and hopes.
Social & External
The people behind it
Letitia Wright
Riz Ahmed
Michael Kenneth Williams
Jodie Turner-Smith
Adepero Oduye
Utilising the Alexeïeff-Parker pinscreen technique, this visually poetic non-narrative film revisits Diego Vélasquez’s 1652 portrait of Queen Mariana of Austria with genuine feeling.
Bel Davis has been hiding behind wigs for years until her Alopecia is exposed publicly. She uses this experience as a catalyst to break free of the shame she feels towards her baldness.
A shy caretaker believes that the father of her teenage charge is falling in love with her, unaware that she is actually the victim of the girl's prank.
In the turbulence of Auckland, Ska (Hunter) is a streetwise 19 year old, whose father is a drunkard and whose older sister works at a high-class massage parlour. When he decide to “rescue” her, he is thrown out. With some friends, he take revenge by trashing the place, but the reply results in Ska's best friend being killed. The massage parlour boss is also a crooked concert promoter, so Ska, and his gang, “hijack” a concert which incites the audience to riot.
After his father committed suicide, Richard decides to stay in a youth center rather than staying with his mother. There, he finds a bizarre bunch of teenagers. Each of them experienced pain from early on, having their own desires and fighting for happiness with peculiar humor and fantasy. Richard doesn’t want to get involved with any of this – if it weren’t for her: Kyra.
In a society where all social customs are based on the beauty of a woman, her challenge is to find self confidence and inner beauty despite having lost her physical beauty.
An anthology of 10 stories depicting real-life incidents of subway riders in New York City, which range from compassion and love to violence and loss.
When the village school master discovers the body of a mean-spirited, miserly old woman, with whom he has had a disagreement, he decides to dispose of the body himself without alerting anyone else to it, but when the body is discovered by another villager the same cycle begins again, with the body eventually passing through the hands of half of the village.
Aging couple David and Eva have lost the spark that once infused their marriage. After nearly four decades together, the elderly duo is feel disconnected and lost. When they discover that Eva is sick, they decide to travel across the country to stay with their granddaughter in San Francisco. On the trip, with Eva's possible death looming, the couple rediscovers the passion and love that had been missing from their lives.
LOVE’S ROUTINE is a dark comedy about a discordant elderly couple, who ultimately prove that love is greater than flesh and blood.
The Chen family contagiousness extends to taking on an extra-marital affair. Gua Ah-leh is at the movie's centre: she shines as Lung's wife, who finds she has a thing or two to learn from the gigolo after Lung blithely. Lang Hisung plays old dentist for broad comedy he is sixty years old.
Three flatmates share a luxury flat. A philandering hairdresser meets his match. A young stockbroker meets his boss's soon-to-be-ex-wife. A pregnant lady unsure over the identity of the baby's father.
In the sequel to Saltimbancii (1981), Fram the polar bear and the performing Marcellonis weather plotting competetors, bumbling kidnappers and family tragedy in this entertaining family film.
Orphans is the true story of a forbidden love affair set in the oppressive and violent atmosphere of nineteenth century Mexico. One man, Melchor Ocampo, driven by the twin passions of love and idealism, defies the stain of illegitimacy to shake off the crippling yoke of Spain and the Catholic Church. In so doing he becomes a founding figure of modern day Mexico.
After the death of her husband and teenage son, a woman puts an ad in a newspaper for a surrogate child.
An elderly widow (Joan Benac) starts to wonder what happened to a would-be lover from her past who appeared with her in a live televised drama in the 1950s. After discovering the show in CBC’s archive, her granddaughter Audrey (Deragh Campbell) attempts to try and track the man down.
Eli has four children, an unemployed husband and a job with an almost impossible commute. Vale is single and makes ends meet by working in clubs as a dancer. Tied by a profound emotional bond of true sisterhood, the two women's lives are two sides of the same coin, but their mutual solidarity isn’t always enough to lighten the load of their difficult circumstances.
Katia’s unexpected journey to Istanbul traps her in a chain of adventures enacted on the front of her disrupted childhood. She discovers her mother’s secrets and faces her own inner desires and dilemmas.
“Xa mou” means “to do whatever I feel like” in the Cretan idiom. Johnny, the film’s main character, is a French man who lives in Crete. He unexpectedly loses his job, but he is reborn when he discovers the small pleasures in everyday life.
In 'Borderland,' Joel (26), an up and coming Latino immigration officer, moves to a small Hispanic town to pursue his career. After the first day of training, Joel realizes that his job is in direct conflict with his personal identity. Joel must decide how to serve his country while honoring his culture.
Divine G, imprisoned at Sing Sing for a crime he didn't commit, finds purpose by acting in a theatre group alongside other incarcerated men in this story of resilience, humanity, and the transformative power of art.
A film about existence from the perspective of 20 nameless black females. Each of the women portray one of the characters represented in the collection of twenty poems, revealing different issues that impact women in general and women of color in particular.
When petty criminal Luke Jackson is sentenced to two years in a Florida prison farm, he doesn't play by the rules of either the sadistic warden or the yard's resident heavy, Dragline, who ends up admiring the new guy's unbreakable will. Luke's bravado, even in the face of repeated stints in the prison's dreaded solitary confinement cell, "the box," make him a rebel hero to his fellow convicts and a thorn in the side of the prison officers.
While participating in a rehabilitation program training wild mustangs, a convict at first struggles to connect with the horses and his fellow inmates, but he learns to confront his violent past as he soothes an especially feisty horse.
Escaped convict Sam Gillen single-handedly takes on ruthless developers who are determined to evict a widow with two young children.
Imprisoned in the 1940s for the double murder of his wife and her lover, upstanding banker Andy Dufresne begins a new life at the Shawshank prison, where he puts his accounting skills to work for an amoral warden. During his long stretch in prison, Dufresne comes to be admired by the other inmates -- including an older prisoner named Red -- for his integrity and unquenchable sense of hope.
A woman is released from prison after serving a sentence for a violent crime and re-enters a society that refuses to forgive her past.
Louis Menkins is five weeks away from being released after 26 years in prison. He is faced with the decision to put his own release at risk in order to protect a young man named Beecher from growing gang controversies.
Timeworn Joe Collins and his fellow inmates live under the heavy thumb of the sadistic, power-tripping guard Captain Munsey. Only Collins' dreams of escape keep him going, but how can he possibly bust out of Munsey's chains?
A young man who was sentenced to 7 years in prison for robbing a post office ends up spending 30 years in solitary confinement. During this time, his own personality is supplanted by his alter ego, Charles Bronson.
Young teen girl Xiu Xiu is sent away to a remote corner of the Sichuan steppes for manual labor in 1975 (sending young people to there was a part of Cultural Revolution in China). A year later, she agrees to go to even more remote spot with a Tibetan saddle tramp Lao Jin to learn horse herding.
Three juvenile delinquents arrive at a correctional center and are put under the care of an experienced guard.
In a suburban landscape, the lives of several families interlace with loss, despair and personal crisis. Esther Gold has lost focus on all but caring for her comatose son, Paul, and neglects her daughter and husband. Lawyer Jim Train is devoted to his career, not his family. Helen Christianson wants to find a new spark in life, while Annette Jennings tries to rebuild hers.
A man befriends a fellow criminal as the two of them begin serving their sentence on a dreadful prison island, which inspires the man to plot his escape.
Gentle and broken, a homeless man fights others on video for money but soon finds comfort in an unlikely friend and the lost diary of a young girl.
Billy Hayes is caught attempting to smuggle drugs out of a country. The courts decide to make an example of him, sentencing him to more than 30 years in prison. Hayes has two opportunities for release: the appeals made by his lawyer, his family, and the American government, or the "Midnight Express".
After killing a prison guard, convict Robert Stroud faces life imprisonment in solitary confinement. Driven nearly mad by loneliness and despair, Stroud's life gains new meaning when he happens upon a helpless baby sparrow in the exercise yard and nurses it back to health. Despite having only a third grade education, Stroud goes on to become a renowned ornithologist and achieves a greater sense of freedom and purpose behind bars than most people find in the outside world.
A withdrawn young man, Leland Fitzgerald is imprisoned for the murder of a mentally disabled boy, who also happened to be the brother of his girlfriend, Becky. As the community struggles to deal with the killing, Pearl Madison, a teacher at the prison, decides to write about Leland's case. Meanwhile, others affected by the murder, including Becky and her sister, Julie, must contend with their own problems.
Mick O'Brien is a young Chicago street thug torn between a life of petty crime and the love of his girlfriend. But when the heist of a local drug dealer goes tragically wrong Mick is sentenced to a brutal juvenile prison where violence is a rite of passage and respect is measured in vengeance.
A man is released from prison after 15 years. He reunites with his high school girlfriend, now a single mother of three. What follows is a lyrical take on love, regret and second chances.
