International Premiere
Written by Iman Qureshi, The Ceremony is a searingly honest take on non-binary marriage, with a twist. The film is part of MicroPlays, a series of short digital plays made as a collaboration between Open Sky Productions and some of the UK’s most exciting writers. It’s a formal ceremony with personal touches, featuring performances that are beautiful and sensitive. In these matters sexual orientation is not relevant, love and its challenges affect everyone and anyone.
Community Partner
Amaka Okafor, Yaz Zadeh, Erika Poole
UK
2021
English
Featured in:
International Shorts: Connect/Disconnect/Reconnect
The films in this shorts program are all about connections. People connecting with one another, dealing with change, or rediscovering a part of themselves and their past.
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
A Long Winter
Based on a short story by Colm Toibin and set in the Rockies in the 1950s, the latest from All of Us Strangers director Andrew Haigh is a piercing emotional drama about a family facing hardships over a few months in a cabin far above town.
Rebecca Horn – the Secret Life of Things
Rebecca Horn's extraordinary biography is interwoven with her surreal oeuvre. An essential document of one of the 20th century's most influential artists, Rebecca Horn – The Secret Life of Things celebrates the unsung legacy of a pioneering visionary.
Image: © Rebecca Horn
What Remains
Stuck in a big city in a mind-numbing domestic routine, a young poetess finds herself at crossroads when her role as a mother and wife starts to overshadow her identity as an artist.
School for Defectors
School for Defectors is an intimate and quietly uplifting documentary that follows a group of 20 teenagers, children of North Korean defectors, as they adjust to life and education at Jangdaehyun School in Busan, South Korea.
Fruit Gathering
Achingly sensual and graced with fine performances, Fruit Gathering depicts embattled desire in a conservative society. Two working-class women fall into a romantic relationship in contemporary Myanmar — but is their love real, or borne of desperation?
Credits
Producer
Martina Klich
Screenwriter
Iman Qureshi
Cinematography
Ahmet Husseyin
Editor
Flaura Atkinson
Production Design
Fiona Mclean
Director
Lisle Turner
Lisle Turner has written and directed two features, Here and Now (2014) and the award-winning Cold (2022). He has directed many shorts including Oxygen (2008) and Canvas (2010). Turner has been nominated at the BAFTA Awards for his work on Channel 4’s The Secret Policeman’s Ball (2006) and has written eight plays with The Idiot Colony which are currently being adapted for television. He is now preparing for his next feature, Mal.
Filmography: Here and Now (2014); Cold (2022)