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Floating 15 rating

Deliciously dark psychodrama about a Docklands bus driver who turns his family home into a second Noah's ark.

Animation & Artists Moving Image 1991 41 mins

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Overview

Disturbed by visions of a labyrinthine London about to be consumed by water, a lonely father begins to destroy his family's tower block flat in order to make room for an unlikely refuge in their front room. Eerie, absurdist and darkly comic, this brilliant psychodrama won director Richard Heslop Best Short Film at Cannes in 1992.

Richard Heslop went to St Martins School of Art and was a punk and a very early skateboarder. He met Derek Jarman in 1981 and subsequently worked on several of Jarman's films, including The Queen is Dead and The Garden. He makes a cameo appearance - alongside fine artist Cerith Wyn Evans - in Caravaggio. Heslop also made pop videos for The Shamen, Happy Mondays and Suede and, in 2012, made the feature film Frank (not to be confused with the 2014 film of the same name), which returned to some of the themes and ideas in Floating. Look out for Keith Allen in this brilliant and very inventive early short.

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