FRANK ELI MARTIN



I am  a London based documentary director and cinematographer. My films explore the boundaries of the documentary form, and I’m particularly interested in the hallucinogenic and the uncanny.

I am a graduate of the Documentary course at the National Film and Television School. 
frankelimartin@gmail.com


Documentary // Commercial


I Am The Immaculate Conception (2024)

London Short Film Festival 2024
Big Sky Film Festival 2024
True False Film Festival 2024
DC Dox 2024
Galway Film Fleadh 2024
The Smalls Film Festival 2024
Uppsala Short Film Festival 2024

     


In 1985, the village of Ballinspittle in Ireland was the site of a mass visionary experience. Worshippers at the local grotto saw the statue of the Virgin Mary come to life. Soon, thousands made the pilgrimage and—for a summer—the phenomenon gripped the country.

Almost forty years later, a handful of local devotees remain, including the statue’s dutiful caretaker Patrick Joseph Simms. Through Simms and a chorus of locals, the film documents both the mystical landscape of rural Irish Catholicism and a terrible darkness beneath its surface.


In an enormous silver dome, on the edge of an Israeli settlement and in the middle of the Palestinian desert, a new and fantastical Israeli theme park has recently emerged.

The film documents both the astonishing absurdity of this strange construction and the perception distorting, even psychotropic, effects it seems to have on its inhabitants. As the film progresses, we encounter a pervasive sense of delusion, and the tragedy behind a gaudy veneer.



Five Scenes From The War in Afghanistan as They Appear in East Sussex (2021)

Nominated IDFA Best Short Doc 2021
Official Selection Sheffield Doc Fest 2022


     
The War in Afghanistan has come to an end and its most tangible legacy for soldiers and civilians alike is its destruction.

Clement Boland is one such victim. The film attempts to convey Boland’s subjective experience of the strangeness of conflict, and the way his damaged imagination imposes a fragmented chronology onto the idyllic landscape of his native Sussex.

Cold Stack (2021)

Nominated Sheffield Doc Fest UK Competition 2021
Edinburgh Green Film Festival 2021
International Panorama Ecofalante 2022


 

Cold Stack charts the melancholic decline of the oil rig industry in the Scottish Highlands.

Divided into three parts, the first depicts the Kishorn fabrication yard, the second documents the dereliction of the Cromarty Firth, and finally the film looks to the future, considering the otherworldly beauty of the wind farming that is now dominant in the area.




©2023