An Encounter with Banting – (Canada) – Documentary directed by Isabelle Depelteau:
In Fall 2021, the world will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of the invention of Insulin, and the man who won Canada’s first Nobel Prize for it: Sir Frederick Grant Banting. But there is an untold story to this famous Canadian scientist turned artist, advocate for the Inuit and philosopher. This is a first person narrative as told by Banting’s detailed journal up until the day before his mysterious death.
Blackwater Mouth Tollesbury Creek Jumping Ladz – (United Kingdom) – Documentary directed by Tilly Shiner:
A filthy love letter to Essex, like you’ve never seen it before. In a village at the end of the road, teenage boys smothered in black mud, run wild through the vast salt marshes in a bizarre tradition hundreds of years old - ‘creek-jumping’. Covid has heightened anxiety about cleanliness - it is a social taboo to be dirty. These teenagers throw mud in the face of social norms (literally). In this extraordinary landscape, ritually transformed by the tide, they race through the creek, hurl themselves into the sea and muse on strange local myths - Cannibalism! Shipwrecks! Nuclear power explosions! As the brink of adulthood approaches they struggle to imagine their uncertain futures but they know just how to live in the present - shoes off, mud between the toes, sun burning down, hearts thumping…