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.
Carol Morley
Casts & Crew
Maisie Williams
Florence Pugh
Maxine Peake
Monica Dolan
Greta Scacchi
Mathew Baynton
Joe Cole
Morfydd Clark
Anna Burnett
Rose Caton
Evie Hooton
Katie Ann Knight
Lauren McCrostie
Elizabeth Marsh
Hannah Stokely
Guy Morris
Katherine Peat
Ben Kerfoot
Jiggy Bhore
Crissy O'Donovan
Simon Paisley Day
Ellie Bamber
Also Directed by Carol Morley
In the middle ages there was an outbreak of dancing manias in Europe that lasted hundreds of years. In the 20th century thousands of Chinese men and some women thought that their genitalia were vanishing, while schoolgirls in Belgium thought that they were being poisoned by a certain brand of fizzy drink. Looking at these various cases, and more, the professor (Maxine Peake) takes us on a musical journey through mass hysteria.
Maxine Peake stars in a short film about three fears (birds, falling, sleepwalking) - filmed and edited in a single day on a mobile phone for Cinema Now, a digital conference held at BAFTA.
Carol Morley tracks down her old friend Catherine Corcoran and returns to India where they once travelled as teenagers, in this playfully autobiographical short.
In January 1970 the actor Sir Alec Guinness wrote a letter to The Times complaining about the lack of attention shop assistants gave to customers. The letter was printed under the heading ‘I’m Not Here’. Using that story as its inspiration, this film about shop assistants and boredom wittily combines extracts from a Harrods' training video and original footage from 'Miss London Stores 1970'.
Carol Morley returns to Manchester, where in the early 1980s, five years of her life were lost in an alcoholic blur. The Alcohol Years is a poetic retrieval of that time, in which rediscovered friends and acquaintances recount tales of her drunken and promiscuous behavior. In Morley’s search for her lost self, conflicting memories and viewpoints weave in and out, revealing a portrait of the city, its pop culture, and the people who lived it.
Based on the filmmaker's collection of newspaper cuttings the film presents private moments that give strange glimpses into everyday life.
A hotel. A cliff. Six lost people, looking for something, or looking to lose themselves.
Annie wants to find her cat and forget her past. She walks the streets of the East End of London, in the footsteps of Josef Stalin and Mahatma Gandhi. Annie's obsessive journey through local history triggers an unravelling of her own life.
Carol Morley's debut short uses the iconography of the genre of melodrama – the staircase, the father – to explore the story of a girl's relationship with her father, and the impossibility of recreating a time, a place, and a memory. Cross-cutting between the girl protagonist and her father, the film creates a sense of crisis and conflict. As the girl invests her feelings in her surroundings and describes events connected to her father, we are drawn into a world of pain and pathos. Morley's first directorial credit was her graduation film from Central St. Martin's School of Art.
Carol Morley's 16mm documentary short is set in a fast food restaurant where a selection of twenty-somethings talk about their troubles. One of two shorts Morley directed as her graduation films from Central St. Martin's School of Art (the other being Girl).