Women in Film: BBC Introducing Arts (2021)

My Girl

Since the rooster died, Jasper's only surviving hen has been depressed. Forced to come down from his mountain where he lives far from everything, the septuagenarian sets out in search of company for his beloved gallinaceous bird.

Life After Death from Above 1979

A documentary about the history and reformation of Toronto punk band Death from Above 1979.

Wake Up

A woman is forced to rediscover her humanity in an increasingly digital world.

Ratcatcher

James Gillespie is 12 years old. The world he knew is changing. Haunted by a secret, he has become a stranger in his own family. He is drawn to the canal where he creates a world of his own. He finds an awkward tenderness with Margaret Anne, a vulnerable 14 year old expressing a need for love in all the wrong ways, and befriends Kenny, who possesses an unusual innocence in spite of the harsh surroundings.

Ok, Call Me Back

Craving companionship, a woman leaves a voicemail late at night. Objects take on new meaning in a lush world of gendered icons.

TommyTeen18

This short film tells the story about a 15 year old boy who explores the world of online dating. Trapped between boy and manhood he tries to find his way.

That Which Once Was

In 2032 an eight-year old boy, displaced by global warming, fends for himself as an environmental refugee in a hostile northern metropolis. Haunted by memories of flooding that left him homeless and orphaned, the boy forms an unexpected friendship with an Inuk ice carver who helps him confront his past.

Feast

This Oscar-winning animated short film tells the story of one man's love life as seen through the eyes of his best friend and dog, Winston, and revealed bite by bite through the meals they share.

On the Line

A female police detective tries to track down a gang of teenage bank robbers while dealing with sexual harassment on the job, and her troubled home life.

Manhattan Cocktail

Nancy Carroll stars in Manhattan Cocktail as Babs, a college coed who dreams of becoming a famous actress. Joining up with her campus chums Fred (Richard Arlen) and Bob (Danny O'Shea), likewise aspiring thespians, Babes heads to Broadway with stars in her eyes. The winsome threesome are quickly disillusioned by the heartless machinations of nasty producer Renov (Paul Lukas) and his harridan wife (Lilyan Tashman). Before the plot proper gets under way, the audience is regaled with a cute "mythological" prologue, featuring the same three leading actors. Manhattan Cocktail was a silent picture, except for two brief musical numbers showcasing Nancy Carroll.

The Trouble with Being Born

Elli is an android and lives with a man she calls her father. Together they drift through the summer. During the day they swim in the pool and at night he takes her to bed. She shares his memories and anything else he programs her to recall. Memories that mean everything to him but nothing to her. Yet, one night she sets off into the woods following a fading echo… The story of a machine and the ghosts we all carry within us.

I Will Make You Mine

Three women wrestle with life's difficulties while confronting their past relationships with the same man.

Sylvia

Story of the relationship between the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.

Ribbon

A young working urban couple is overwhelmed with the birth of a baby girl but parenthood has its own challenges.

The Milk of Sorrow

Fausta is suffering from a rare disease called the Milk of Sorrow, which is transmitted through the breast milk of pregnant women who were abused or raped during or soon after pregnancy. While living in constant fear and confusion due to this disease, she must face the sudden death of her mother. She chooses to take drastic measures to not follow in her mother's footsteps.

Dog Food

When Declan loses his dog and best friend, Ralphie, his life starts to unravel.

Covid Love

Plot unavailable

Yuri on the Phone

Plot unavailable

The S.O.S.S.B.U

3 Cornell students are broke and left with no money, they must come up with a plan to seek their way into wealth. Will they succeed?

Here

In East Riding, Yorkshire, seventeen-year-old Kaden reluctantly takes a job at the local strawberry field over the Summer. A quiet introvert, Kaden doesn’t fit in with the other farmhands, who are all older, and more experienced, and treat him with contempt. It is here he encounters Lucas, an aloof eighteen-year-old who has worked at the farm for several Summers now. Underneath his initial indifference, Lucas hides a deeper curiosity for Kaden. Desires disentangle in this new, uninhibited, and sun-drenched environment, as the two boys tentatively begin to explore their feelings towards one another in secret, a kinship that forces them to confront their own internalized homophobia, shame, and sense of belonging.

Treat Me Like Fire

Revolves around the relationship between a gambling addict and a young woman who falls madly in love with him and will stop at nothing to win his heart.

Paulownia

Three boys experience self discovery at a skate park. [Made by director Hugo Esposti in his second year at Bournemouth University on the BA Hons Film course.]

We Need a Resolution

A 15 year old boy remembers his friend after he was killed because of the colour of his skin. A short film set in the 1980s in the UK.

Pearl

Competitive bodybuilder Léa Pearl is preparing to compete for the prestigious Miss Heaven title. Her coach, Al, a former bodybuilding star, hopes that, thanks to Léa, he will be back in the spotlight once again. But at the last minute, Léa's ex arrives with their son Joseph, who she hasn't seen in four years.

Anemone Me

The only black American family in Maine has a son, a blind bodybuilder, who falls in love with a white "mer-boy."

The Purple Sea

Nothing - not her father, not the church - can stop unruly Angela from being with her childhood best friend turned great love, Sara. Based on a true story, Viola di Mare, presents a uniquely engaging portrait of family, community and gender roles in a 19th century Italian village.

Beautiful

Determined to win the Miss American Miss pageant, Mona is ready to sacrifice anything and everything to guarantee herself the crown including her own daughter! She manages to persuade her best bud to raise the kid as her own (Miss AM can't be a mom), but just when this beauty-queen wannabe thinks her prize is in sight, she's surprised by a come-from-behind competitor. Love.

Deep Impact

A seven-mile-wide space rock is hurtling toward Earth, threatening to obliterate the planet. Now, it's up to the president of the United States to save the world. He appoints a tough-as-nails veteran astronaut to lead a joint American-Russian crew into space to destroy the comet before impact. Meanwhile, an enterprising reporter uses her smarts to uncover the scoop of the century.

K-19: The Widowmaker

When Russia's first nuclear submarine malfunctions on its maiden voyage, the crew must race to save the ship and prevent a nuclear disaster.

Poz

A troubled "twunk" ventures down a destructive path, searching for a solution to his problems and a way to ensure his sister's continued support.

Samira

Janosch, an interpreter, is called to help during a police deployment at the Port of Hamburg. A young African woman has barricaded herself in a container ship and threatens to commit suicide. In order to get her out, Janosch promises to help her, an offer which bears unexpected consequences.

Silence

After being discovered trying to escape, a woman must survive the night with her abusive girlfriend.

20 Weeks

During a routine scan, a young couple navigating their first pregnancy discover a health condition that could gravely impact their baby, forcing them to re-examine their relationship and their future.

I'll Meet You There

A Muslim cop goes undercover at his estranged father's mosque while his daughter hides her passion for a forbidden dance, uncovering a shocking family secret.

Gayndr II

In this short film the audience is confronted by one young man and his reaction to text messages received from other guys on different gay dating apps. It explores communication between gay men today and the use of dating apps.

The Passion of Remembrance

Co-directed by Blackwood and Julien, the first full-length feature film by Sankofa Film and Video offers a radical and necessary interrogation into what constitutes 'post-colonial' identity at a time of political and social restlessness in Britain. Set within an isolated desert landscape contrasted with recognizable scenes of the intensity of family life, this vanguard work demonstrates the richness and variety of the black experience; it is a poetic and hard-hitting commentary on the complexities of race, gender and sexuality.

Dreamers

Caught without papers, Isio is relocated and trapped inside Hatchworth Removal Centre, where she learns that finding love, friendship and freedom sometimes means doing the wrong things.

Cream

The time has come for CREAM - the latest product that will fix your life. This is the story of Dr. Bellifer, a scientific genius, who after years of smashing particles together, reveals his revolutionary new product: a cream with the power to fix all of the world’s problems.

A Little Burden

An intrepid intern confronts a painful reality on her first day at a prestigious new job.

Hominid

Two ambitious primatologists and their small team of researchers are funded for an 8 week research trip into the depths of the Northern Cascades to find what they believe is the truth behind the legend of Sasquatch.

Where to Go

Mitchell and Miles once spoke the language of love fluently, but now even a dream trip can't drown out the silence growing between them.

Zodiac

Peter is an eight year old boy who lives in a cheap hotel room. When his mother oddly disappears, a transsexual woman comes to take care of him, against her own will. Sooner or later Peter will find out that this is the woman with the 'plumed snake', the woman that will pull him to outside world, where anything is likely to occur.

The Falling

England, 1969. The fascinating Abbie and the troubled Lydia are great friends. After an unexpected tragedy occurs in the strict girls' school they attend, a mysterious epidemic of fainting breaks out that threatens the mental sanity and beliefs of the tormented people involved, both teachers and students.

The Quiet Hour

In a remote part of rural, post-apocalyptic England, now occupied by unseen alien invaders, a feisty teenage girl sets out on a desperate attempt to fight back a group of bandits and defend her parents' farm, their remaining livestock, and the solar panels that keep them safe from extraterrestrials. If she doesn't succeed, she will lose her only source of food and shelter; if she resists, she and her helpless blind sibling will be killed.

The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond

Fisher Willow is the disliked Memphis débutante daughter of a plantation owner with a distaste for narrow-minded people and a penchant for shocking and insulting those around her. After returning from studies overseas, Fisher falls in love with Jimmy, the down-and-out son of an alcoholic father and an insane mother who works at a store on her family's plantation.

Crazy for Christmas

A girl loses her parents and husband and is left driving a limo trying to get by raising her young son. An interesting but strange rich man hires her limo on Christmas eve and has her drive him to various ice rinks where he gives out $100 bills to the people there. The news media catches on and starts following him.

Anti-Clock

A complex and fascinating experimental exploration of time and identity, Anti-Clock is a film of authentic, startling originality. Brilliantly mixing film and video techniques, Arden and Bond's paranoid, psychological surveillance study of a career gambler turned clairvoyant unstuck in time captures onscreen the anxieties that have infiltrated the consciousness of so many in Western society.