Erik Knudsen

What happens when fertility becomes a commodity in a fractured society? Oedipus reborn. Sophocles' classic of classics adapted for the 21st Century.

On his 9th birthday, Thomas travels with his mother to visit his estranged father who, since an acrimonious divorce, has abandoned urban living in favour of an isolated rural life in the English Lake District. The bitter separation of his parents is not something Thomas understands, nor does he understand his own dysfunctional behaviour as a silent cry for help. As a digital native city boy, Thomas’s encounter with the natural world, and his gradual understanding of the pivotal connection he provides for his, ultimately, lonely parents, leads to realisation and discovery. There are things his parents don’t know about each other that only he can reveal. Perhaps he has the power and the means to change everything.

On the eve of a critical election debate, Josh Joseph, earmarked for continued ministerial success, decides to take a significant political risk. He leaves London and drives to the north of England, in order to visit a female childhood friend, Maddy, whom he has not seen for 17 years. This inexplicably irrational action threatens his political career.

Set in the small Cuban town of San Antonio de los Baños, just outside Havana, Vainilla Chip tells the story of an ordinary day for an elderly ice cream maker, Javier Rodriguez Casanova. An ordinary day which, like all the other ordinary days, has become painfully pierced by an acute sense of longing for his deceased wife. This film is an intimate portrait of a hard working man in a contemporary Cuba far removed from clichés of The Revolution and romanticised memories of Cuban music. Vainilla Chip brings the musicality of one ordinary man’s life to the fore to reveal a universal struggle affecting many people across cultural and political divides.