The New Ten Commandments
The film was produced by Nick Higgins from Lansdowne Productions and Noémie Mendelle from the Scottish Documentary Institute and has 10 film-chapter directors for each of the 10 chapters of the film. The film's unifying theme is human rights in Scotland with each chapter illustrating one of the "New Ten Commandments" - 10 articles chosen from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The 10 film chapters of The New Ten Commandments 1. The Right to Freedom of Assembly - Dir, David Graham Scott 2. The Right not to be enslaved - Dir, Nick Higgins 3. The Right to a fair trial - Dir, Sana Bilgrami 4. The Right to freedom of expression - Dir, Doug Aubrey 5. The Right to life - Dir, Kenny Glenaan 6. The Right to liberty - Dir, Irvine Welsh & Mark Cousins 7. The Right not to be tortured - Dir, Douglas Gordon 8. The Right to asylum - Dir, Anna Jones 9. The Right to privacy - Dir, Alice Nelson 10. The Right to freedom of thought - Dir, Mark Cousins & Tilda Swinton.
Tilda Swinton
Irvine Welsh
Douglas Gordon
Kenneth Glenaan
Alice Nelson
Mark Cousins
Nick Higgins
David Graham Scott
Sana Bilgrami
Doug Aubrey
Anna Jones
Also Directed by Tilda Swinton
The Ways of Seeing writer is celebrated by Tilda Swinton and her fellow admirers in an unorthodox four-part documentary that visits him at his Alpine home
Also Directed by Irvine Welsh
Stubbornness is the strength of the weak.
A darts player slides into depression after an heart attack spooks him so much he loses his skill.
Also Directed by Douglas Gordon
To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Lansdowne Productions and the Scottish Documentary Institute gathered together some of the most talented filmmakers and visual artists based in Scotland. Collectively they created the feature length documentary, the New Ten Commandments. This short, The Right not to be Tortured is one of those commandments.
A cinematic experience by Douglas Gordon - in which the film D.O.A. is screened simultaneously on three screens beside one another, but at slightly different speeds. The films quickly fall out of synch with one another. Déjà-vu uses footage from D.O.A. 1949-50, a Hollywood thriller directed by Rudolph Mateé. The film has been transferred to video and is projected simultaneously on three parallel screens at normal speed as well as slightly faster and slightly slower - 25, 24 and 23 frames per second (left to right). This has the effect of making the three identical narratives diverge increasingly over time, and inducing in the viewer an experience similar to déjà-vu.
A cinematic backdrop, created by Douglas Gordon, for Rufus Wainwright, in which the singer's eyes are filmed in slow motion and overlapped. The film is shown here accompanied by Wainwright's Sonnet 10 - but the film was also shown as a video backdrop during the singer's live concerts.
24 Hour Psycho is the title of an art installation created by artist Douglas Gordon in 1993. The work consists entirely of an appropriation of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 Psycho slowed down to approximately two frames a second, rather than the usual 24. As a result it lasts for exactly 24 hours, rather than the original 109 minutes. The film was an important work in Gordon's early career, and is said to introduce themes common to his work, such as "recognition and repetition, time and memory, complicity and duplicity, authorship and authenticity, darkness and light."
Avri Levitan and Roi Shiloah are a pair of acclaimed classical musicians from Israel who were booked to play a special concert in Poland, performing Mozart's "Concert Symphony in E-Flat Major" with one of the nation's leading orchestras, the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra of the Polish Radio. However, the two musicians chose an unusual route to get there -- viola player Levitan and violinist Shiloah took the train from Berlin to Warsaw, in effect following the same path their parents were forced to use when they were sent to the Third Reich's death camps in 1939. Filmmaker Douglas Gordon and his camera crew were on hand for the trip, and K.364: A Journey By Train is a documentary that contrasts the beauty of Mozart's music and the enthusiasm of two world class musicians with the legacy of one of the darkest episodes in human history.
Halfway between a sports documentary and an conceptual art installation, "Zidane" consists in a full-length soccer game (Real Madrid vs. Villareal, April 23, 2005) entirely filmed from the perspective of soccer superstar Zinedine Zidane.
I Had Nowhere To Go is based on Jonas Mekas’s diary. It’s been over 70 years since he left his village in Lithuania to escape Nazi persecution. He was 22 years old. Today he is one of the last surviving members of a displaced generation and one of the greatest documenters of the human experience.
Domestic (as long as it lasts) was made in 2002 in Gordon’s one-bedroom apartment in downtown New York City. It shows the artist’s foot repeatedly kicking the camera around a clean, quiet domestic space until the video blacks out. The victim of the booting, the camera itself, is recording the footage we see. The viewer is disoriented by the film’s upsetting of the conventional relationship between documenting and participating, which makes the camera complicit in the act.
Also Directed by Kenneth Glenaan
In England, the Pakistanis Yasmin lives two lives in two different worlds: in her community, she wears Muslin clothes, cooks for her father and brother and has the traditional behavior of a Muslin woman. Further, she has a non-consumed marriage with the illegal immigrant Faysal to facilitate the British stamp in his passport, and then divorce him. In her job, she changes her clothes and wears like a Westerner, is considered a standard employee and has a good Caucasian friend who likes her. After the September, 11th, the prejudice in her job and the treatment of common people makes her take side and change her life.
Father Sherko is increasingly concerned that his daughter Resa is getting sick. Presenting themselves at the hospital they encounter a number of asylum seekers from their block, all demonstrating similar symptoms. At first it looks like an epidemic of flu, but soon it appears to be something infinitely more sinister. Quickly the civil and emergency services are beyond breaking point and it emerges that the authorities are powerless to halt this disaster. When Asylum Support Unit worker Rabeena Dhondy arrives at Sherko and Resa's flat she finds the little girl is suffering from an extremely bad cough. At the hospital, the doctor Annie Millbrook diagnoses flu.
Shaun and Daz are vibrant kids, wasted by their experience of education. All they have is friendship and Shaun's first love Katy. From the moment Shaun steps into our world he is bound to lose. Labeled as a violent bully he destroys himself and Daz with him. Shaun has twelve years to reflect on an intense summer of love, sex and loyalty. But Daz's imminent death forces Shaun to confront his past.
Inspired by the life of Jacqui Jackson. Helena Bonham Carter stars as Maggi, a mother with seven children - three 'normal' daughters and four sons who are each, in one form or another, autistic.
Unique retelling of the Biblical story of Noah and the Ark. "Noah's Ark" is a timeless tale, a story of family, one man's faith, and his fixation with building an ark that may ultimately save both his family and mankind.
Louise Evans is a single mother who works as a customer advisor for big bucks investors at a slick, pin-striped bank. On a night out with her best friend Anna she's introduced to Anna's slippery new boyfriend Phillip. Phillip makes Louise an indecent proposal: accept a briefcase full of money in return for helping him to defraud one of the bank’s richest clients.
A musical journey from the Scottish Highlands to the southern US.
The political and personal life of Charlie Haughey during his time in office.
Noah, a farmer and family man, is instructed by an angel to build an ark in the middle of a desert in order to save both his family and the faithful from a devastating flood. A seemingly impossible task, especially when his sons refuse to believe him and help, Noah risks ridicule and humiliation from the degenerate townsfolk as well as his loving but exasperated family, in his quest to carry out his God-given task.
On a day much like any other, Mick and Carmen, two hard-drinking lovers down on their luck, set out to satisfy their hunger. But food is not their only need. As the day progresses, tensions rise and their stormy relationship is put to the ultimate test.
Also Directed by Alice Nelson
In 1984, Mrs A heard voices in her head. They said “don’t be afraid”. They said she wasn’t crazy …and they informed her she had a brain tumour. The remarkable story of a woman who owes her life to unseen angels and an eminent psychologist who was prepared to believe.
A man who had sex with his bike is charged as sex-offender. An animation between reality and ... ?
Also Directed by Mark Cousins
Belfast, it's a city that is changing, changing because the people are leaving? But one came back, a 10,000 year old woman who claims that she is the city itself.
A collection of films from an eclectic array of contributors commissioned to raise funds for the Bristol independent cinema The Cube.
Abbas Kiarostami is the most acclaimed Iranian film director whose films have won prizes all around the world. In this film he gives a rare and frank interview about his work, and journeys out of Tehran to meet Babk Ahmadpoor the now grown up star of his famous trilogy which started with Where is the Friends House. On the journey Kiarostami picks up the camera himself, producing images of pure poetry.
As he prepares for surgery to restore his vision, Mark Cousins explores the role that visual experience plays in our individual and collective lives. In a deeply personal meditation on the power of looking in his own life, he guides us through the riches of the visible world, a kaleidoscope of extraordinary imagery across cultures and eras. At a time when we are more assailed by images than ever, he reveals how looking makes us who we are, lying at the heart of the human experience, empathy, discovery and thought. He shares the pleasure and pain of seeing the world, in all its complexity and contradiction, with eyes wide open. As the COVID-19 pandemic brings another dramatic shift of perspective, he reaches out to the other lookers for their vision from lockdown, and he travels to the future to consider how his looking life will continue to develop until the very end.
Mark Cousins invites film actors and directors to watch major scenes in their career to date, and to talk us through them.
A young man's swirling thoughts as he contemplates the murder of filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini shortly after the deed takes place.
Film maker Mark Cousins visited northern Iraq in the summer of 2008. This is a snapshot of what he found there. An imaginative, soulful reflection of a beautiful complicated place.
In Kino Klassika’s first film commission, British filmmaker Mark Cousins imagines a conversation between D.H.Lawrence and Sergei Eisenstein. This playful film essay carries forward Mark’s film dialogue with Eisenstein from his feature film about Eisenstein in Mexico ‘What is this film called Love?’
The film is a collection of one-minute short films created by 60 filmmakers from around the world on the theme of the death of cinema.
Orson Welles trained as an artist before he become an actor and director, and continued to draw and paint throughout his career - character sketches, storyboards, set designs, pictures of the people and places that inspired him. These artworks are a sketchbook of his life, and most have never been seen outside his family and close friends. For the first time, award-winning director Mark Cousins has been granted access to this treasure trove of imagery, to make a film about what he finds there - the story of Welles' visual thinking, never before told. An exclusive new perspective on one of the 20th century's greatest creative figures, whose art and life continue to fascinate audiences today.
Also Directed by Nick Higgins
How do you capture the essence of Scotland in just one film? You invite people from all across the country to submit their unique visions in a mass participation project and combine them into a poignant, thrilling, moving, and often very funny impressionistic self portrait of contemporary Scotland.
Also Directed by David Graham Scott
A journey to Africa with a vegan filmmaker and a big game hunter on his last big hunt.
Once again, David Graham Scott examines how some addicts use the plant medicine iboga to detox rapidly—and how, sometimes, the conditions in which they detox put them at risk.
Also Directed by Sana Bilgrami
In 1955, a young woman emigrated from Pakistan to the Outer Hebrides in Scotland. Fifty years and three generations on, a testing new journey begins.
The story of the 900 Belizean lumberjacks who in 1942 left the tropical rainforests of British Honduras to help Britain fight fascism by felling trees in Scotland. Sam (93), Eric (87) and Amos (86) were among those who stayed on after the war to make new lives in a country where, for better or worse, the colour of their skin marked them out. Newly discovered archive, long cherished memories and a last reunion are intertwined in this lyrical and moving documentary testament.