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Browse 131 movies from Arts Council of England
Short documentary following a new band travelling to Norwich for their fist gig outside London. The singer is a teenage boy from East London and the band combines rap, traditional Indian sounds, ragga and reggae to examine politics, cultural identity and racism.
Jan 1995
County Durham, England, 1984. The miners' strike has started and the police have started coming up from Bethnal Green, starting a class war with the lower classes suffering. Caught in the middle of the conflict is 11-year old Billy Elliot, who, after leaving his boxing club for the day, stumbles upon a ballet class and finds out that he's naturally talented. He practices with his teacher Mrs. Wilkinson for an upcoming audition in Newcastle-upon Tyne for the royal Ballet school in London.
Sep 2000
Will Plunkett and Captain James Macleane, two men from different ends of the social spectrum in 18th-century England, enter a gentlemen's agreement: They decide to rid the aristocrats of their belongings. With Plunkett's criminal know-how and Macleane's social connections, they team up to be soon known as "The Gentlemen Highwaymen". But when one day these gentlemen hold up Lord Chief Justice Gibson's coach, Macleane instantly falls in love with his beautiful and cunning niece, Lady Rebecca Gibson. Unfortunately, Thief Taker General Chance, who also is quite fond of Rebecca, is getting closer and closer to getting both.
Jan 1999
Construed in the time of running clouds, a panoramic and another examination of vacant buildings on the British shore (Orford Ness), a deserted place on Earth, place of non-specificity as a base for an open course of events that shape the sense, consisting in interaction between the image and the viewer.
Jan 2008
Sam Moore's Doubled Up tells of the shock and awe of finding out she was expecting twins. The film is an opulent and multi-faceted song of love, panic, fear and lots of nappies.
Nov 2004
Sir Robert Chiltern is a successful government minister, well-off and with a loving wife. All this is threatened when Mrs Cheveley appears in London with damning evidence of a past misdeed. Sir Robert turns for help to his friend Lord Goring, an apparently idle philanderer and the despair of his father. Goring knows the lady of old, and, for him, takes the whole thing pretty seriously.
Photographer Charles Castle is numbed with grief following the death of his beautiful bride. He goes off to war, working in the trenches as a photographer. Following the war and still in grief Charles is given some photographs purporting to be of fairies. His search for the truth leads him to Burkinwell, a seemingly peaceful village seething with secrets
Sep 1997
Reflecting on the legacy of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture, "Ouvertures" follows a collective’s process of translating Édouard Glissant’s play Monsieur Toussaint from French to Creole.
Oct 2019
With the dark resonance of the nursery rhyme from which it is drawn, this river story probes isolation and imagination, all painted directly onto hard plaster.
Jan 1994
Max is a handsome young man who, after a fateful tryst with a German soldier, is forced to run for his life. Eventually Max is placed in a concentration camp where he pretends to be Jewish because in the eyes of the Nazis, gays are the lowest form of human being. But it takes a relationship with an openly gay prisoner to teach Max that without the love of another, life is not worth living.
Nov 1997
In 1972, disenchanted about the dreary conventions of English life, 25-year-old Julia heads for Morocco with her daughters, six-year-old Lucy and precocious eight-year-old Bea.
Feb 1999
The difficult relationship between a young gay South Asian man and his father, refracted through images of the late film star Sabu of Jungle Book and Elephant Boy.
Jun 1998
After saving each other from jumping off a bridge, Henry Bell and Karen Knightly plot to avenge the people who drove them to suicide. Henry will ruin the life of the woman who married Karen's boyfriend, while Karen will work as a secretary for the man who took Henry's job. Whether revenge will be sweet – or bittersweet – is anyone's guess.
An eager couple, Charlotte and Myles, are interrogated by two Home Office agents about their spousal visa application. They endure a series of assessments that become progressively performative to attest to the legitimacy and acceptability of their relationship.
A prospector sells his wife and daughter to another gold miner for the rights to a gold mine. Twenty years later, the prospector is a wealthy man who owns much of the old west town named Kingdom Come. But changes are brewing and his past is coming back to haunt him. A surveyor and his crew scouts the town as a location for a new railroad line and a young woman suddenly appears in the town and is evidently the man's daughter.
Dec 2000
In early 20th century New York City, an impoverished socialite desperately seeks a suitable husband as she gradually finds herself betrayed by her friends and exiled from high society.
Oct 2000
Tony Harrison's poetic essay on the working class - in particular the British miners -, its struggles, its dreams and its icononography - at the very end of the 20th century, as interpreted through the myth of Prometheus.
Apr 1999
Short documentary film about the influence of African oral tradition, poetry, dance and drumming on popular musical forms such as rap, hip-hop and jungle.
Across the surface of the forest, light, colour, shadow shift; rhythmic, kaleidoscopic. Matter and the immaterial in constant counteraction. The screen becomes a painting in animation. Ordinarily, light describes the motif. Here, the forest is almost – almost – occluded as the light that delineates the world becomes autonomous, visible; describes itself as subject. There are some very strange effects: light and shadow grow, die back; bark shimmers; branches tremble, or clouds pass above; trees shiver in the cold, or shake in threatening gesture; sunlight flickers, on and off, like an electric bulb. The portrait lives. These films are not the index of space and objects, but a cinema of time, movement, light; flickering lashes of mesmerised eyes in the click of an aperture.
Jan 2004
A cine-poem, taking as a starting point Martin Luther King's 1967 speech, given on receipt of his honorary doctorate from the University of Newcastle, and visiting key locations in the city's history of civil resistance.
Sep 2017