Dreams of a Life

Annie wants to find her cat and forget her past. She walks the streets of the East End of London, in the footsteps of Josef Stalin and Mahatma Gandhi. Annie's obsessive journey through local history triggers an unravelling of her own life.

Carol Morley returns to Manchester, where in the early 1980s, five years of her life were lost in an alcoholic blur. The Alcohol Years is a poetic retrieval of that time, in which rediscovered friends and acquaintances recount tales of her drunken and promiscuous behavior. In Morley’s search for her lost self, conflicting memories and viewpoints weave in and out, revealing a portrait of the city, its pop culture, and the people who lived it.

Based on the filmmaker's collection of newspaper cuttings the film presents private moments that give strange glimpses into everyday life.

In a last-ditch mission to get recognition for her talent, Audrey Amiss (Monica Dolan) persuades her psychiatric nurse, Sandra Panza (Kelly Macdonald) to take her on a road trip back to where her story began – but with so many deviations along the way, will they ever make it?

Six troubled strangers arrive at a hotel located on the south coast cliffs of Dover. Looking for something, or looking to lose themselves entirely, the guests spend time together in the cold, isolated setting. As tentative connections form, they begin to uncover a shared purpose that unites them.

Mike Hoolihan is an unconventional New Orleans cop investigating the murder of renowned astrophysicist Jennifer Rockwell, a black hole expert found shot to death in her observatory. As Mike tumbles down the rabbit hole of the disturbing, labyrinthine case, she finds herself grappling with increasingly existential questions of quantum mechanics, parallel universes, and exploding stars. The hunt for a killer draws a detective into an even larger mystery: the nature of the universe itself.

England, 1969. The fascinating Abbie and the troubled Lydia are great friends. After an unexpected tragedy occurs in the strict girls' school they attend, a mysterious epidemic of fainting breaks out that threatens the mental sanity and beliefs of the tormented people involved, both teachers and students.

Carol Morley's debut short uses the iconography of the genre of melodrama – the staircase, the father – to explore the story of a girl's relationship with her father, and the impossibility of recreating a time, a place, and a memory. Cross-cutting between the girl protagonist and her father, the film creates a sense of crisis and conflict. As the girl invests her feelings in her surroundings and describes events connected to her father, we are drawn into a world of pain and pathos. Morley's first directorial credit was her graduation film from Central St. Martin's School of Art.

Maxine Peake stars in a short film about three fears (birds, falling, sleepwalking) - filmed and edited in a single day on a mobile phone for Cinema Now, a digital conference held at BAFTA.

Set in England in 1977, The Week Elvis Died is an evocative and bittersweet look at life from a child's point of view. Karen (Jennifer Williams) aged 10 is bullied at school by Julie and her gang. Her dysfunctional family can't help her and she doesn't confide in them. All she has for comfort are her descant recorder, her pet rabbit Elvis and her adoration of top disc jockey Tony Blackburn.

Carol Morley's 16mm documentary short is set in a fast food restaurant where a selection of twenty-somethings talk about their troubles. One of two shorts Morley directed as her graduation films from Central St. Martin's School of Art (the other being Girl).