My Name Is Happy
As a teenager, Mutlu Kaya, a Kurdish woman from southeastern Turkey, was a promising singer. She was on the brink of breaking through to the final of Turkey’s Got Talent in 2015 when she was gunned down by a man whose marriage proposal she had refused. She suffered life-threatening injuries.
Nick Read
Director
Ayse Toprak
Director
Also Directed by Nick Read
A behind-the-scenes look at Moscow's prestigious Bolshoi Theatre as it's rocked by an acid-attack scandal in 2013.
Kate Adie returns to the scene of one of her most memorable assignments: reporting the massacre of hundreds of civilians in Beijing in June 1989. She hears eyewitnesses' stories.
With unprecedented access, this documentary looks into the hidden world of one of Russia's most impenetrable and remote institutions - a maximum security prison exclusively for murderers. Deep inside the land of the gulags, this is the end of the line for some of Russia's most dangerous criminals - 260 men who have collectively killed nearly 800 people. The film delves deep into the mind and soul of some of these prisoners. In brutally frank and uncensored interviews the inmates speak of their crimes, life and death, redemption and remorselessness, insanity and hope. The film tracks them though their unrelenting days over several months, lifting the veil on one of Russia's most secretive subcultures to reveal what happens when a man is locked up in a tiny cell for 23 hours every day, for life. A startling insight into inscrutable minds and the forbidding world they have been condemned to. (Storyville)
A cinema verite portrait of the recording of Zevon's swansong album: 'The Wind' - the twelfth and final studio album by Warren Zevon, was released 11 years ago today (26 August 2003). Zevon began recording the album shortly after he was diagnosed with inoperable plural mesothelioma (a cancer of the lining of the lung), and it was released just two weeks before his death on September 7, 2003. The album was awarded the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album.
Shot over 3 months through the Monsoon, Nick Read's film captures the unvarnished reality of life for four children living in the slums and on the streets of Mumbai: seven-year-old Deepa, who lives next to an open rubbish dump and runs barefoot through Mumbai traffic selling flowers to help support her family; 11-year-old Salaam, who, a few weeks after running away from his abusive stepmother lives rough outside the main railway station; and twins Hussan and Hussein, also 11, who risk cholera and infection fishing for scraps in a filthy canal so they can earn money to eat.
Also Directed by Ayse Toprak
In focusing his attention on the competitors of Mr Gay Syria, director Ayse Toprak shatters the one-dimensional meaning of “refugee”. Using the pageant as a means of escape from political persecution, the organiser Mahmoud — already given asylum in Berlin — hopes to offer the winner a chance to travel as well as bring international attention to the life-threatening situations faced by LGBT Syrians.
