DEVELOPMENT
Learning To Breathe Under Water
Starring Maria Bakalova and Rory Kinnear
Autistic Eight-year-old Leo’s best friend is an 8m shark which his dad Peter, an artist, put in the roof of their house. Leo misses his mum and Peter misses his wife, but their new Polish au pair Anya isn’t either of those things –She’s a whole different kettle of fish.
Director: Rebekah Fortune
Writer: Richard Brabin
Producer Jack Tarling; Shudder Films
Sales: Bankside Films
Selected for JETS,
Berlinale finalist VFF talent award,
Brit List, Breaking Thru The Lens
Funded by Screen Ireland and Wales Screen
BARREN
At the edge of a fractured civilisation, a mother and daughter must embark on a brutal pilgrimage to save all that they love.
Written By Dan Shaw & Rebekah Fortune
Directed By Rebekah Fortune
Produced By Alice Lusher for ieie Productions
An intimate and fraught mother-daughter tale playing out across the desolate hills, rolling plains and endless marshes of a British Isles that never saw the industrial age. The patriarchy were rendered weak and largely infertile from their obsessive mining for the inefficient glistening black ore Shine. Women overthrew them. A matriarchy was installed, but now they too have become warped and greedy in their rule. Working their men to death, and raiding the countryside for fresh able fertile bodies, they risk turning into the very monsters they destroyed.
An autistic teen, cast out from her village and taken in by wood folk struggles to choose between losing her voice, or her family.
A peasant’s village in a time past, on the edge of an endless wood. Life is hard, the villagers don’t live, they survive. A hard life brings with it a cold edge. At the age of seven, each child is tested, and those found to be ‘other’ are cast out into the wood, led out by an ailing elder, never to be seen again.
The spartan villagers know nothing of the commune in the wood, where the outcast; the disabled, the neuro-divergent, the different, live in a jigsaw bliss. There’s magic in the woods, but also shadows. The Grim lurks in the darkness, consuming all that stray too far alone.
Agnes is different. She will change them all.
