Directing
Award winning and acclaimed British documentary filmmaker
A very emotional look at the loneliness and heartache often conjured whilst travelling by train.A powerful and stunning piece with a focus on love lost, love found and regret.
Director Marc Isaacs installs himself in the lift of a typical English tower block. People start talking to him, and we discover their lives.
Marc Isaacs makes a deal with The Synthetic Sincerity Lab, an AI research project affiliated with the University of Southern England. There, researchers are investigating the possibility of teaching AI characters authenticity, using characters from Isaacs’ documentaries to do so. In return, they allow Isaacs to film the process.
Two ageing siblings sit next to each other in a pub, waiting for instructions from the filmmaker which never come. They watch the time go passing by.
Our host Ben Ferguson and director Marc Isaacs travel to the Lincolnshire town of Boston to reveal a local story about communal fears about change and immigration.
The residents of a Bangladeshi village anxiously wait for the heavy monsoon rains to clear. However, the rain continues and catastrophic flooding submerges their crops and houses.
Splices together images from Isaacs's documentaries to create an experimental montage set to a soundtrack.
A stark portrait of a town in decline. Brilliant juxstaposition between the scoff faced English day trippers searching for cheap booze, and the cold, snivelling asylum seekers existing on the streets. Thrown into the mix are two English ex pats, trying to make money against the odds.
Philip and His Seven Wives (2006) a film made for the BBC’s prestigious Storyville strand, tells the intriguing story of a former messianic rabbi who believes that he communicates directly with God. Isaacs’ captivating and intimate documentary is a portrait of this unconventional family whose lives revolve around faith and obedience to the head of the household.
An exposed Cumbrian village by the sea surrounded by windmills, fields and factories provides a striking setting for this fairy tale of young love and the loss of childhood innocence. Over one year, the film follows the 9 year-old Laura Anne and her 11 year-old cousin, Steven as they move towards the end of their childhoods. The narrative is told in rhyme by the young female protagonist. As time passes and the seasons change, feelings and memories from all our childhoods are evoked and we wonder what time will make of Laura Anne and Steven.
When the Filmmaker is told his next film must be about crime, sex or celebrity to get funded, he takes matters into his own hands and begins shooting in his home with a cast of characters connected to his own life. We first meet two English builders, employed to replace the garden fence, temporarily removing the barrier between the house and a Pakistani neighbour. This introduces the film’s central theme of hospitality which ultimately finds its expression when a homeless Slovakian man charms the Filmmaker’s Colombian cleaner to let him in and tests everyone's ideas of the expectations and boundaries between host and guests.
Over a single night, the filmmaker invites the viewer to experience the life of an elderly man tied to his bed.
Award winning filmmaker Marc Isaacs explores the secret life of Britain's truckers, discovering an uncharted world of isolation, loneliness and the open road. Finding many of these men sleeping in their own trucks in lay-by car parks and service stations, this film is an intimate and poignant portrayal of modern masculinity on Britain's motorways.
They arrive, they smoke, they wait - armed robbers seeking redemption, life-long thieves, addicts and anxious fathers of wayward children. Hard exteriors hide soft centres, old lives exist in young bodies - ordinary people awaiting judgement on an unlovely stretch of pavement outside a London magistrates' court. Whilst waiting for their cases to be heard they reveal their lives, and the complexities of the human soul are laid bare. Tense and intimate conversations with the filmmaker illuminate stories that the magistrates hear daily. Director Marc Isaacs spent three months outside Highbury Magistrates Court and, in doing so, demonstrates how the eye of the camera has the ability to delve much deeper into character and motivation than the eye of the law. Consequently, the more we get to know the characters in this film, the harder it is to make easy judgements. Whilst the court must judge, the filmmaker need not.
Frinton-on-Sea is a town that doesn't like change. The shops, the sea front and even the people haven't changed for decades. So when Network Rail announced it was going to automate the town's manually operated level-crossing gates, there was a call to arms. Filmmaker Marc Isaacs meets the people who have decided to grow old in England's most conservative seaside resort.
The body of a young Polish woman is found in a suitcase on a London canal adjacent to a block of flats. The filmmakers invite the residents to reflect on how the murder has affected them. Through their stories we are provoked to think about our own relationship to the strangers living in our midst.
Built from the ground up from a series of introspective shots throughout Marc Isaacs's significant body of non-fiction work, Moments of Silence captures people feeling overwhelmed by difficult thoughts, pause and fall silent, seemingly dwelling on their past, contemplating their current ordeals, or worrying about their future.
All White in Barking is a compassionate and illuminating documentary probing the attitudes of Barking's white residents toward their new immigrant neighbours. Isaacs is an unseen, but prominent, presence, questioning prejudices and prying at preconceptions with remarkable results to produce a vivid picture of the attitudes and perceptions at the heart of an increasingly multicultural Britain.
In Men of the City, Isaacs takes a more stylised approach to the lives of workers in the City of London during the recent financial meltdown, balancing sensitive portraits of diverse individuals striving to retain their dignity and humanity in the midst of the crisis. Strong human characters are at the heart of all of Isaacs' work, and with these films he continues to create a unique vision of modern Britain.
A young Chinese documentarian visits a small English village in which she encounters the friendly ghosts of its former residents and inadvertently uncovers long-held secrets.
