Arts Council England

Familiar Phantoms is an experimental documentary short film about memory, history and trauma.

A tale of lost innocence, greed and the random justice of nature. When a boy and girl find an idol in the stomach of a rabbit, its magical abilities lead to riches. But for how long?

“It can take years to get over the loss of a loved one, but it can take a few heartbeats to lose yourself.” Inspired by a childhood memory, artist and filmmaker Ed Lawrenson fuses the sound of his heartbeat with the imagined sound of Roman soldiers marching through tunnels beneath his childhood home, to create a deeply personal short film that explores loss and memory.

The Rosie Kay Dance Company present a piece about the strange history and pop-cultural aftermath of CIA mind control experiments during the Cold War, with documentary segments by Adam Curtis.

From the lush and green grass of the Kazakh Steppe to the glorifying architecture of its capital, from its giant open-air mines to the traces of invisible nuclear power, Kazakhstan is here captured in fragments. A fake observational film, but a genuine geographical and historical journey, through the remnants of the Soviet past and the contemporary capitalist ambitions of the country.

Miranda July looks back at her Artangel project, an interfaith charity shop that opened up unannounced inside one of the world's most famous department stores in August 2017. Situated on the third floor of Selfridges, London, surrounded by designer boutiques, this shop was run and staffed jointly by four religious charities invited by July: Islamic Relief, Jewish charity Norwood, London Buddhist Centre and Spitalfields Crypt Trust.

In a world where water has become a scarce commodity, a young scavenger finds a source to satisfy her thirst.

At home, an old woman tunes into the radio. As rain drips into the house, dark manifestations appear in her mind.

Don’t Look at the Finger follows a ceremonial ‘fight’ between two protagonists, a man and a woman, in the grand architectural setting of a church. The way the characters communicate is a feat of choreography that combines Kung Fu with signed languages to express a ritualistic coming together.

Njafweniko is a tender and tense short film about caring for a loved one suffering from mental health issues by First Acts filmmaker Emma Taonga Sayers. Through contemporary dance, Emma calls attention to how race interacts with perceptions of mental health.

John Berger is one of our most celebrated and respected writers and broadcasters. A former winner of the Booker Prize, he also wrote one of the most influential books on art of our time, Ways of Seeing, which became a landmark documentary series on BBC Television. In Ken McMullen's engaging and accessible film, Art, Poetry and Particle Physics, he travels to the world's biggest particle physics laboratory at CERN in Geneva. The film charts an extraordinary and wide-ranging series of discussions and collaborations between Berger and the leading theoretical and experimental physicists John March Russell and Michael Doser.

Filmmaker Tegan Pearce combines autobiographical spoken word and expressive visual direction to present a cinematic interpretation of autism.

'London Market eXcess' is a term used in the Lloyds insurance industry to describe the practice of re-insuring a policy over and over again, increasing the risk at each turn in the 'spiral' until the whole financial edifice collapses under its own weight. With Thatcher as our narrator, this film takes us on a fast-forward ride through the high-rise 1980s and the lottery-led 1990s. A conceptual pop promo about Britain’s transition from greed, speed and paisley patterns to risk, insecurity and financial meltdown.

A fugitive escape path across five interlinked spaces - city, motorway, forest, coast and sea - using pen and ink drawn interventions into a live action journey.

An art film about the campaign to save the Joiners Arms, the iconic queer pub in East London. Working directly with members of ‘Friends of the Joiner’s Arms’ and queer actors based in East London, Giles employed participatory workshops and verbatim theatre as structures to produce a discursive social network and the resulting film. The film mixes transcribed scripted dialogue with interjections and commentary from the group.

Two figures wander the desolate Yorkshire Moors building colourful worlds around themselves. Absurdity ensues when their paths cross.

‘Wendy’ is a film response to the work of composer, electronic music innovator and polymath, Wendy Carlos. The work orbits a duet rehearsal for four hands on one piano. Together, Frances Scott and Chu-Li Shewring learn to play ‘Timesteps’, transcribed from the original score composed by Wendy Carlos, first imagined for Anthony Burgess’ book, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (1962), and later realised for the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation.

When did you last rest? When did you float weightlessly, your aching muscles soothed by lapping water?

The Jump connects the widely recognised fantasy of Hollywood action and superhero films with the domestic setting of the artist’s British Indian family home in the UK. Featuring 17 of his family members, the film was shot in his grandmother’s home, the house that he and all of his immigrant relatives have lived in at various points since 1967, and where his grandmother still lives.

In an office world of half light, flickering fluorescent tubing, ringing phones and monotonous paperwork, the residents sit trapped in a state of frustration, inactivity, boredom or semi-consciousness. As the lights flicker, they get on with their chores and tasks, maybe half aware that they may never escape their surroundings for anything better.