Raindance TV

The five stories in THE OPTIMISTS are inspired by Voltaire’s famous satirical novel Candide and its motto: “Optimism is insisting everything is good, when everything is bad.” The setting is present day, post-Milosevic Serbia. Painted with black humour, these stories reflect a time filled with hope and despair, real optimism and false; a time when fiction and reality co-exist side by side, and when many people fish in the troubled waters of lost illusions. The acclaimed actor Lazar Ristovski (“Underground”, “The Powder Keg” aka “Cabaret Balkan” in the USA, “Midwinter Night’s Dream”) takes a role in each of the five stories.

As the sun rises over the Iranian desert on a morning like any other, a boy leaves his home to collect shrubs to sell at the market. At the same time, a desperate woman sets out in her battered jalopy to dump the body of her lover into the well. He is the only witness to her crime and he must die. She guns the engine and sets off after him; he runs for his life, using the textures and secrets of the desert to evade her. This Hitchcockian pursuit leads us through ancient ruins, goatherds' cottages, underground aqueducts and finally to the boy's house and a gory, sudden end. The boy's rising desire for revenge and the woman's deteriorating health and increasing disorientation mean that the original reason for the chase is quickly forgotten, as is the distinction between pursuer and pursued.

A documentary that manages to tug at many different emotions, PORTRAITS OF A NAKED LADY DANCER offers a glimpse of life as an exotic dancer. Travelling to Washington, DC, director Deborah Rowe speaks to a selection of ladies who ply their trade in the clubs of the city. Rowe had attempted to fund previous film projects by stripping to earn money, so was perfectly placed to draw out intimate testimonials from her subjects. Zoe and Jessica are the two girls whom Rowe primarily focuses on, and the duo tell remarkably different stories about their time in the industry. What makes the film even more fascinating is the five year gap in filming, with Rowe returning to her subjects after a lengthy hiatus to see how their attitudes have changed towards the profession. The results are startling, and it's a testament to Rowe's filmmaking skills that once the credits roll, it's hard not to wonder exactly what the future holds for these girls.

George, a former Sheffield foundry worker, becomes Gamekeeper on a country estate in South Yorkshire. He delights in his job, enjoying the countryside and protecting the pheasants from all their predators, both foxes and poachers. However, this is no bucolic idyll. His son is bullied, his wife isolated and the poachers that he is chasing are his former colleagues. His stoicism and dry humour see him through. Whatever the contradictions, it has to be better than three shifts in a steel factory.

A documentary representing 24 hours of London life

FIRECRAKCER is a bold and shocking true-to-life tale of murder in small town Kansas. Set against the stark beauty of Middle America, this astonishing story of abuse, suffering and denial reveals dreams of escape.

A teenager suffering the painful ministrations of his social-climbing father; a lugubrious driving instructor with the hopes and dreams of his young charges on his shoulders; a young woman preparing an anniversary dinner for her partner, only for his best friend to turn up in his place. It takes only a few scenes for the audience to realise nothing is quite what it seems in each of these stories and as the charactersí journeys start to overlap both literally and thematically, the twists start coming thick and fast.

PEP SQUAD is a lurid trip through the lives of a handful of students attending the seemingly average Oak Hill High School. But what might have been a pleasant little tale about life in the Midwest quickly turns rotten. The Student body is uniformly jaded, obsessed with sex, drugs and suicide, the parents are clueless, self-involved and thoughtless, the principal is a lecherous bum who gets a well-deserved comeuppance, the cheerleaders are a bunch of drunken sluts in short-skirts and pompoms who can be easily bought off and the coveted title of Prom Queen is something the candidates would kill forÖliterally!

CARRY ON KEN is a documentary tribute to the life and work of acclaimed British film director Ken Loach. The film is part of Ken Loach's 70th birthday celebrations and coincides with the release of his latest Palme D'Or winning film, THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY. This documentary charts his career and his working methods through film clips and interviews with many of his collaborators including Robert Carlyle, Cillian Murphy, Brian Cox, Ricky Tomlinson and Peter Mullan.

The Last Monk is a tantalizingly erotic tale of a young woman named Swapna and her dawning spiritual awareness as she journeys to the desolate region of Ladakh in the Indo-Tibetan plateau, the cradle of one of the oldest civilisations on earth, so that she can complete her doctoral dissertation in Cultural Buddhism. To do so, she must leave Pushkar, her husband of only 15 days and IT professional, behind in Delhi. In Ladakh she meets the enigmatic but charming Sonic, 25-year-old Buddhist scholar who opens her eyes to a mystical landscape.

Peter is dispatched by moral crusader Henry Harding from Parliament to infiltrate the fetish/S&M world to gather evidence for persecution. Thrust into the sex-glamour-shock of the clubs, Peter falls under the spell of New York sex goddess Tanya Cheex. Her outragous show and lifestyle threaten to send her straight to jail.

A physicist struggling to prove one of Einstein's theories still finds time to dabble in an extra-curricular relationship with one of his lab assistants. Meanwhile at home his under-sexed wife struggles under the assumption that he is hard at work with his experiments. All of which explodes when she discovers otherwise.