Jason Ford

The Draymen Estate has become an urban legend. Amongst the sinister stories of unsavoury locals and brutal violence, several people have apparently gone missing. Even the police won't go there. Enter two naive student filmmakers with a well-meaning plan to make a sympathetic documentary of life on the estate. The unlucky duo quickly discovers that problems of drugs and crime in this community go way beyond the norm. This is a community which is about to present the students with material of unimaginable horror - turning their final project int their darkest nightmare.

London, 1846: successful barber, Sweeney Todd, has for years been haunted by the loss of his parents at the hands of a cruel Judge. One fateful night, his path crosses with local baker, Mrs. Lovett, a woman who too has suffered a devastating miscarriage of justice by the same judge and his corrupt associates. Scheming to put a deadly end to the cycle of abuse and exploitation, Todd and Lovett make a pact, and it is her that leads the charge in seeking a bloody revenge, in the most macabre of ways.

Elliott Jordan stars as a white collar button pusher whose life gets turned upside down when he gets involved with Nicki (Katharine Peachey), one-time girlfriend of local psycho Si Naylor (Paul McNeilly) This low budget British indie also goes by the title This Is Essex for its DVD release.

Bearing many similarities to Albert Camus' 1946 existentialist text L'Etranger (The Outsider), The Darkest Hour is a powerful portrait of contemporary urban angst, isolation and unrequited love. Pat leads an apparently ordinary life as an attendant in a notorious public toilet where the majority of the clientele are either involved in drug deals or cottaging. The only light in his otherwise solitary life is Kim, a girl he is infatuated with, who works in a local cafe he frequents. When he is 'provoked' into committing an act of extreme violence, Pat's subsequent unorthodox reaction to his crime leads inevitably to his life changing forever.