John Wagland

A short film following a grieving farmer and an injured fox entangled in the weeds he has allowed to grow in his garden. Through a brief conversation, the fox provides the farmer with a life-changing world view and the courage to continue.

The director couldn’t have anticipated the coronavirus epidemic, but here is a near-future world in which a middle-class protagonist lives indoors, congratulating himself on the economic virtues of having ingested ‘animal condensed’ – an unexplained substance that seems to merge human and animal – and its benefits to his comfortably alienated life. “It optimises, it abstracts… it made us safe, here at home, with our accelerated portfolios”, he explains. Upstairs, his daughter virtually reconfigures Peppa Pig. Outside, meanwhile, hiding in the forest, is an unnamed, camouflaged fugitive, who explains her escape from a society that seems to have happily abolished the distinction between organic and technological life. An artist who has become a guerrilla fighter, the woman is busy preparing totem-like countermeasures to disrupt those who have become ‘animal expanded’.

A shy young man plucks up the courage to seek a partner through a dating agency.

Seventeen-year-old Richard and his parents take their annual seaside holiday in a guesthouse on England's east coast in the 1950s. Julia, a teenage girl holidaying with her parents in a nearby guesthouse, catches Richard's eye, but her Dutch friend Anna is intent on causing trouble.

'I left home about six weeks ago. Came home from school, washed, changed and went. I had enough of being grateful. When I said we ought to shoot the horse and make it into hamburgers for Africa, Dad laughed. Mum thought it was an ungrateful thing to say' Janna leaves home, but is life on the streets better than life at home?