Chinese Boxes

A collection of films from an eclectic array of contributors commissioned to raise funds for the Bristol independent cinema The Cube.

Content is an ambient 21st-century road movie, an associative film essay inspired by driving’s trancelike state rather than any linear unfolding of the road.

Asylum is a film very much derived from chaos, expressing implicitly the ideas conjured up by its title. A strange mix of both documentary and fiction, where in the future a group of people are looking back at the twentieth century. A virus has wiped out most of the culture of the twentieth century, leaving just fragments of a project called 'The Perimeter Fence' to be pieced together. These fragments make up a documentary about an exiled group of disparate yet similar minds.

While on vacation at a resort hotel in the West Indies, Miss Marple correctly suspects that the apparently natural death of a retired British major is actually the work of a murderer planning yet another killing.

A filmmaker sets out to make a voyage of discovery on London's orbital motorway, the M25. He enlists the help of several others to film the motorway from several points, drive endlessly around it and dig up stories and potential beauty behind the motorway.

Set in 1970s Britain, a man drives from London to Bristol to investigate his brother's death. The purpose of his trip is offset by his encounters with a series of odd people.

In this enigmatic thriller, Susannah (Tusse Silberg) is suddenly herded out of an apartment in the middle of the night and brought to a police station for extensive questioning about why she was in a place that belonged to a known criminal. What the police do not know is that Susannah has been somehow involved in the death of a woman and has reunited with her sister Julie (Lisa Kreuzer) in Berlin. Julie herself has some rather unusual friends -- including Eddie Constantine the American-born French actor and singer who plays himself. It is these characters and their dialogue and asides, and even background action and scenery, that form the real body of this specialized film -- not the plot. For these reasons, this type of film is best limited to those who are more interested in avant-garde than in commercial cinema.

A re-edit of Petit’s Radio On (1980)

‘The Cardinal and the Corpse' marks the beginning of Petit’s loose partnership with writer Iain Sinclair. There’s a nod towards narrative here involving a book-search launched by graphic novelist Alan Moore and a dealer (the dapper but barking Driffield), but it’s little more than an excuse to showcase a number of authors and other miscreants.

A short film detailing the ways that TV has failed as a creative and expressive medium in the UK through various sped up and slowed down clips of football, have I got news for you, diana's funeral and footage from chat shows.