film

What’s been happening?

This year there were a lot of applications made, a lot of writing undertaken, and many ideas put out there. From that were returned some opportunities that have proved really valuable.

EIFF Talent Lab

In August I was selected as one of the participants in the Edinburgh Int. Film Festival Talent Lab. Over the course of two weekends together we heard from industry professionals, drawn from writing, directing, producing, casting. It was intensive and it felt like I learned more about the film industry in those two weekends than I have all year. Really lucky and grateful to have been a part of it.

The full participant list:

Roisin Agnew, Catriona McNicoll, Morna Pearson, Dipo Baruwa-Etti, Mike Callaghan, Eleanor Capaldi, Toby Fell-Holden, Rebekah Fortune, Sarah Grant, Jack King, Josephine Lohoar Self, Ciaran Lyons, Razan Madhoon, Iqbal Mohammed, Eric Romero, Victoria Thomas, Reece Cargan, Chloe Chudasama, Emily Everdee, Rachel Gold, Jamie MacDonald, Nick Rowell, Annika Ranin, Sanam Soleimany

EIFF Talent Lab Participants 2021

New Talent Mentorship

I was lucky enough to be selected for the Glasgow Film Festival’s New Talent Mentorship programme, paired with filmmaker Siri Rødnes (Take Your Partners, Shetland). Over the next 6 months there will be an opportunity to develop my writing, learn more about the industry and find out any useful advice and support that Siri can give. When everything still feels so new and opaque in places, a bit of a guidance through it all is very welcome.

Thanks to Emma and all colleagues at GFF for this opportunity, and to MUBI, in association with ScreenSkills as part of the BFI Future Film Skills Programme, using Funds from the National Lottery.

Full mentee list: Eleanor Capaldi, Alice Cornelia, Bjorn Hanson, Jennifer Heaton, Catriona MacLeod, Paul Sng, Joanne Thomson, Scar Ward.

Round up

Through 2020 – 2021 I’ve been mostly trying to get through this wild ride of the pandemic like everyone else, focusing on writing rather than production for the moment. My last short from the before times, Glue, was nominated for Best of British at Queer Vision Film Festival, in association with Iris Prize and Encounters Film Fest in 2020. Having been accepted into Roze FilmDagen fest in 2020 it received an in person screening in the Netherlands this year. You can see the trailer below.

I’ve been taking part in story development workshops with GMAC, which has provided opportunity to explore ideas and try things out. I was admitted to the RADA Summer Course ‘Taking Text Apart’, which gave me the chance to approach writing from a different perspective and spend some time with Beckett, Checkhov, and Shakespeare.

Thinking of heading into the New Year, while there is most of the mentorship still to go, various opportunities to apply for and numerous ideas in the works, the pandemic has reinforced a sense of wariness, as there’s so much uncertainty. That said, all being well, I’m going to keep working on it all, and hopefully have something to show.

There are lots of people who help you along the way, even at this fledgling stage, and for anyone who’s read a draft, given me feedback, encouraged me when I wondered what on earth I’m doing (and why!) – thanks.

Take care, rest well.

Image Credit: Reflection Room by Flynn Talbot. Photo by E Sumner

New Film – Glue

The next short I’ve written and directed, Glue, is now finished and going out into the festival world! It will screen at SQIFF in Glasgow this weekend, and from there, we’ll find out!

Glue-400002055.png

Glue explores that inbetween moment, when you’re caught between the past and the future, the person you were, and who you could be (aka lesbian exes meet up).

Credits:
Poppy Lironi as Agnes
Jess Brodie as Anna

DoP                       Ania Urbanowska
Sound Design     Heather Andrews
First AD               Cat Atkinson
Editor                   Vilte Vaitkute
Colourist             Jack Goessens
Make Up              Eleanor Gault
Runner                Tanja Schangin
Photographer     Karen Gordon
Bar Person          Clare Macdonald
Extras                   Tawnya Renelle
Dora Hamilton

Update: Film News

Found out this summer that my short film will be at the Scottish Queer International Film Festival 2017! Screening in the Scottish shorts programme, ‘Pull’  is in great company and it will be fab to see it play to an audience. For details: http://www.sqiff.org

Otherwise been writing and submitting poems and stories, hopefully some news on those soon, and performed poetry at the West End Festival, Village Storytelling Festival and with LGBT Health and Wellbeing. Planning on getting back to more performances, more filmmaking, more writing, just… More! Screenshot_20170903-225737

 

 

With its meditations on the nature of humanity, the arrival of Wonder Woman couldn’t be more timely

 

Diana, Princess of Themyscira, is (in)famously the only leading woman of a comic book film since 2005’s Elektra. The invisibility of women in superhero films is endemic and so entrenched it has become the norm (try and imagine a 12 year absence of male led superhero films being entertained). In the hands of director Patty Jenkins (Monster, 2003) Wonder Woman delivers a suspenseful story dynamically told.

 

Diana Prince is given the context and history of an origin story, as an only child of the Amazon Queen nipping at the heels of her impressive and ferocious fighting sisters, her idols. Relationships are explored between mother and daughter, friends and siblings on this woman only paradise.

 

A harmonious life, it is abruptly disrupted by the interruption of Chris Pine’s WW1 pilot. Diana is compelled to leave the confines of Themyscira with him, aggrieved at his stories of war and suffering.

 

There are light touches of humour deftly played by Lucy Davies as Pine’s secretary (cue the response to her job description, “We call them slaves”) which pitch against the horrors of war and Diana’s earnest outrage. This is where Wonder Woman departs from superheroes before her, in her significant capacity for compassion and empathy. Gadot imbues this fierce warrior with a warmth that enriches both character and story.

 

In a plot which sees mortals developing chemical weapons,  and enact mass killing at the German front, it is the goddess who ends up bringing a humanity to proceedings.

 

The palette of the film evokes vintage footage and steeliness,  so that in full Wonder Woman action, Diana does not look so incongruous on the battlefield as one might think.

 

There are pointed moments of deliberate attempts at ‘girl powered’  dialogue and attitudes, which mostly succeed. However,  a throwaway line describing Diana as being distracting sits poorly – there doesn’t need to be any reinforcement of the idea that men can’t help themselves when a woman is around, even if she is this wonderful. The token slightly sleazy companion who seems included to reflect more regressive male attitudes also detracted, even though this same character delivers a bold statement on racism that was a welcome one. This unevenness in the treatment of the character may reflect the writing and story team (male only). For a film which will undoubtedly reach a young female audience, there is no need to tell them that men find women fighting each other a turn on. It would have been better to see Diana have more female characters to interact with, Peggy Carter and Diana taking on WW2 together is a tantalising idea for example. For now, this writer remains pleased that attempts to tether Diana to a male love interest were brief and her story remains one of a journey to discovering her own powers and purpose.

 

Jenkins’ assured direction of this anticipated and much needed addition to the world of film balances thrilling action with a humanity that should leave us all wondering how we could better navigate a difficult time in our history by looking towards the qualities of this wonder woman.
This film passes the Bechdel test (due to conversations between Diana and her mother). 
Emc

Film – An Apple a Day

Film making tends to involve recruiting a team of people, and even when it can be done on low or even no budget, some money is usually helpful, and on a professional level essential.

So I wanted to set myself the challenge of making something at home, on my own, with props and any equipment already in the house. It felt important to prove somehow that at the heart of a film is a story, and that is something, with no backing or help, that I can be capable of. So, this film is a bit rough round the edges. The autofocus self adjusts sometimes. And there is a segment of content I would have adjusted if I had picked the music in advance (I picked it after, and did pay 99p for it, although I now wonder if it might have been around the house too). I sacrificed some music sync at the beginning so that image and picture matched more towards the end.

The story: A commitment to healthy eating is challenged by a tempting sweet treat…

https://vimeo.com/205228813

The Falling

 

Director Carol Morley Cast  Maisie Williams, Florence Pugh, Maxine Peake
UK, 2014, 1hr 32 mins, 15

The Falling’s writer and director Carol Morley brings her first full length feature film to screen, marking the culmination of a career making predominantly documentaries, by producing this hazy meditation on emerging adulthood.

In tone and feel The Falling is reminiscent of the Australian Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir, 1975), which sees a boarding school group of girls on a trip inexplicably disappear. Morley has alluded to Antipodean influences, additionally citing the work of Jane Campion and her first feature film Sweetie (1989). This explored the relationships between sisters, in particular an increasingly tension filled dynamic, reflected in the friendships of Morley’s leading cast, alongside a hint of mysticism in the air. The immersion in the world of a girl group facing the disruption of adolescence also finds a point of recognition in The Virgin Suicides (Coppola, 1999). Alongside Campion, Morley’s dual writer/director roles and visual approach place her alongside UK peers such as Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay.

Graduating from the Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, Morley has amassed a significant collection of short films, touching upon ideas which find themselves surfacing again here, such as in The Alcohol Years (2000), where Morley revisited her younger years to piece together a five year period between the ages of 16 – 21 which were lost. It is in The Madness of the Dance (2006) however, that the clearest connections emerge.

The Madness of the Dance examines a combination of mass hysteria and individual compulsions such as biting and trichotillomania, so called “psychic rebellions.”[1] A Professor (Maxine Peake) takes the viewer on a journey through hysteria in varying forms across the centuries. It was “the ancient Mediterranean world (that) traditionally believed that bodily symptoms we now call hysterical were caused by a womb which wandered throughout the body.” [2] The Hippocratic era notion of the “wandering womb” finds itself under consideration in The Falling, where this collection of hysteric behaviours finds itself transposed and focused in one arena; an all girl’s school in 1969.

The central pairing of The Falling comprises Abigail (Florence Pugh) and Lydia (Maisie Williams). The intensity of their friendship, exhibited through the carving of their initials into a tree together, lingers in a suggestively romantic area. In the way that girls play with each other’s hair, and share their darkest secrets, there is an intensive intimacy entwined with the friendship. This close bond is disrupted in the light of Abigail’s sexual experiences with boys. In the study of mass hysteria there is often the identity of a natural leader, someone particularly charismatic. It finds here two leaders of the charge, in both Abigail and Lydia.

The film opens with a shot of the water, the lake in the school grounds, reflecting the leaves of several looming trees. Their colours are transforming into those of autumn, setting an expectation of an environment on the precipice of change. The film’s themes are also clearly established, as the water soon gives way to the moon, which leads into a science class on the subject of the egg. Womanhood and adolescence are bound up with nature from the initial opening scenes, providing a context of burgeoning sexuality within which the plot of mass hysteria unfolds.

The film employs techniques such as the use of visual layering and a nippy cutting style. The latter is mostly factored into the episodes of hysteria which manifest themselves through fainting spells. The effect is jarring, and disorientating, creating a temporal discontinuity. The technique is used lightly, but effectively plays on notions of perception, which are also wound throughout the film. The dreaminess lends itself to the quality of a nightmare, as what is real and what is not become difficult to discern.

These edited montages could be a collection of skewed memories, recent or long past. This kernel of a reference to collective memories neatly aligns with Morley’s method for her process of creating the film. In a recent interview she explained how she “…thought about what age the characters would be now or which of them would be dead. And what they would say about the events in the film now…”[3] The often hypnotic transitions between scenes, the layering of flowers to faces to bark to tree, offer a presentation of the fragmentary manner in which the mind can piece thoughts together.

The mood of the film is further buoyed by a score which comes from musician Tracey Thorn. The schoolgirls are part of an Alternative Music Orchestra, led by Abigail, whose compositions gave inspiration to Thorn’s score. School instrument favourites – the recorder, the triangle, the xylophone – combine underneath the drip drop knock on wood of a marimba sound. Through this, a hint is given at the cumulative effect of one fall after another to come.

While the school children insist their affliction is real, the majority of the teaching body beg to differ. This results in a conclusion of psychological cause, rather than physical ailment. An out of shot psychiatrist cross-examines the group, the most discernible nod to Morley’s documentary roots emerging in the interview style which is utilised. While the film broadly alludes to repressed issues finding expression in the hysteria outbreak, the message speaks beyond this. These are girls who are kept contained, regimented, and moderated by the school system and the expectations placed upon them. As these restrictions tighten the underlying discontent flows, and bubbles over. These girls have something to say, and they will be heard.  

Originally written for and published on glasgowfilm.org

Red Road

Red Road
Director Andrea Arnold Cast Kate Dickie, Tony Curran, Martin Compston UK/Denmark, 2006

Red Road (2006) marks a particular peak in Scottish film making. A culmination of cross-country exchange and creative development, it proved a critical success, going on to win the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. It was the first of a planned trio of films as part of the Advance Party project, a collaboration between Glasgow-based Sigma Films and Zentropa of Denmark. With elements filtering through of the Dogme95 movement and its pre-requisites, Advance Party contained its own specific criteria. This set of stipulations revolved around limiting the budget, shooting duration and filming digitally. There was also a specific focus on guiding first time feature filmmakers, which led to the involvement of Red Road writer/director Andrea Arnold.

It was Arnold’s short film Wasp (2003) which lay as a precursor to Red Road. It captured a snap shot of a young mum’s life, her four children in tow wherever she was to go, struggling to feed and clothe them. Keeping the camera close and untethered toward her female family, a precarious unpredictable quality emerged which translated well to the storytelling in Red Road. Also brought over was the short’s lead actress Natalie Press, who stars here as Martin Compston’s girlfriend. The characters to appear across all the Advance Party films were developed between Lone Scherfig and Thomas Andersen of Zentropa, but they were brought to life under Arnold’s precise guidance.

The film follows Jackie (Kate Dickie) a CCTV operator based in Glasgow, intricately unpicking the journey which has led her there. Jackie oversees the movements of a corner of Glasgow life from her monitor desk. Faced by a bank of screens, Jackie reigns omnipotent as she zooms, controls, and pieces together the fragments of the inhabitants’ lives. A scope of control all the more vital, relevant, because it has been unavailable to her privately. The grid-like assortment of screens both visualises the co-existence of people who live alongside each other and yet never meet despite their close proximity, while revealing unexpected connections.

When Jackie unexpectedly spots Clyde (Tony Curran), a recently released prisoner with whom she has an as yet unexplained connection, she crosses the barrier from screen to street. Falling into real-life pursuit, Clyde becomes her target. The nature of his connection to her is withheld from the audience for most of the film’s duration, and the increasing tension is reflected in frequently unsettled, chaotic outbursts between characters. Whoever he may be to her, the camera, and the perspective, stay firmly with Jackie. The towering Red Road blocks, from which the film takes its name, are clouded in dank gloom, enhance the sensation of foreboding. Incrementally, the reasons behind Jackie’s removal from family life, her stoical expression, her self-enforced detachment, are revealed.

The lean production format is mirrored within the film’s content, for example dialogue is utilised sparsely, and the iconic, though now party demolished, Red Road flats are laid bare. There is a development of filmic style, where a European art house aesthetic can be perceived. This is a woman’s experience set amongst a recognisable, though fractured, Glasgow, but it is in the ambiguity, the shadows and the silhouettes, and the floating carrier bag seen thrashing through the air, which attest to an alternative sensibility. Jonathan Murray comments on this in The Cinema of Small Nations (2007) when he says, “The early 2000s witnessed a collective turn to Europe that was aesthetic, thematic and industrial in nature. …these films manifested a shared desire to explore private experience and complex, extreme psychological states, rather than exploit popular genres and conventional narrative forms. [1]” Red Road, then, followed further the filmmaking path as observed by the likes of fellow Scottish productions at the time such as Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself (Scherfig, 2002), and Morvern Callar (Ramsay, 2002).

Beyond Red Road, Arnold has made further features including Fish Tank (2009) and Wuthering Heights (2011). Fish Tank in particular took themes explored in her previous work, featuring a young woman struggling with her circumstances and familial relationships. Leaving Glasgow for an Essex setting, there is a perceptible return to the waspish roots of her first foray. It is in Red Road however that an establishment in feature filmmaking was made, and with it a valuable, distinctive, contribution to Scottish film.

Originally commissioned for Glasgow Film Theatre.

 

[1] Hjort, M and Petrie, D (eds) (2007) The Cinema of Small Nations, Edinburgh University Press.

Winter Sleep

Winter Sleep Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan  Cast Haluk Bilginer, Melisa Sozen, Demet Akbag Turkey, 2014, 3h16m, 15.

Across the past two decades, the landscape of Turkish cinema has seen the emergence of leading names onto the international film scene. Sharing stylistic and aesthetic visual qualities, this crop of filmmakers have converged on themes of family, and isolation, as explored in the work of Zeki Demirkubuz in Fate (2001), an adaptation of Camus’ L’Étranger and particularly in Semih Kaplanoglu’s childhood trilogy, culminating in Bal (Honey) (2010).  The role of nature and the landscape observed in Bal, as a framework within which human foibles unfold, resonates when viewed alongside Ceylan’s oeuvre.

Ceylan’s most recent film prior to Winter Sleep was the equally measured Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2010), which brought not only visual expanses and seemingly undramatic moments to the screen, but also the reward of the Grand jury Prize at Cannes in 2011. Roger Ebert observed of this film that Ceylan “…doesn’t slap us with the big dramatic moments, but allows us to live along with his characters as things occur to them.” [1] It is this undramatic yet simultaneously eventful quality which reflects the approaches of Ceylan’s self-confessed influences Yasujiro Ozu and Robert Bresson. [2] Films by these directors, in which a naturalistic exploration of life as it unfolds, are described by Andrew Klevan in Disclosure of the Everyday: undramatic achievement in narrative film, as types of film which have the capacity to “uncover profundity by structuring narrative around a range of life experiences…based in the everyday, that is in the routine or repetitive, in the parently banal or mundane, the uneventful.” [3] He goes on to clarify that such a style does not preclude “visually emphatic” images, a balance of seemingly opposed stylistic choices which converge in Winter Sleep; seen in the dramatic looming ‘steppes’, and the tempestuous weather system, unfolding alongside family discussion, routine habits, and otherwise emotive events (a hand smashed into a window, left to bleed) conveyed with stark lack of ceremony.

The pervasive panoramic vistas of …Anatolia punctuate Winter Sleep further, providing an integral minimalistic sparseness which not only permeates the look of the film, but also ties the characters inexorably to the landscape. The capture of these towering formations in their wide establishing shots can be linked to Ceylan’s interest in photography, sparked by a gift of a book on the skill which he was given as a child. [4] Building his own dark room and printing photographs, he developed his interest in the art, the results of which can be seen in his photographic series “Turkey Cinemascope” (2004) [5]. Here, the panoramic lens is turned to city streets and plains, revealing an ongoing fascination with this visual perspective.

The stillness captured in these photographs is transposed to the screen, wide shots used frequently, as a smaller detail placed centrally in the frame focuses the attention. Howling winds and the cry of a bird barely accompany the opening shots of the ancient and unmoving steppes in Winter Sleep, in amongst which the solitary figure of Aydin stands. His diminution against this overwhelming landscape establishes swiftly a collection of ideas which will be explored throughout the film, including isolation, disconnection, and the tension between that which changes and that which remains static and unmoving.

Symbolism is utilised with precision in Winter Sleep, as a smashed car window renders the passenger hidden and fragmented behind fractured cracks. Both Aydin and his wife Nihal are often caught looking out of windows, trapped inside, or filmed reflected in mirrors, both alluding to notions of perspective, barriers, and the question of transparency. Their peering through various looking glasses recurs throughout the film as it delves into the relationships between Ayid and his wife, and also his sister, Necla. Despite literal cracks and longing looks, there is energy and vitality as embodied in the wild horses on the local plains. The process of capture and ‘breaking-in’ required to tame the wild animal speaks more widely to the various battles for freedom and dominance which ensue across the film.

The contrasting stillness of the landscape as opposed to the active human lives within is conveyed in the predominantly static camera style, as it steadily frames the unfolding ructions. The disparity of scenes being given a chance to breathe while the characters may be suffocating further heightens the tension between what may have been dreamed or hoped for, and what is. One exchange between Ayid and his sister Necla, taking place as he writes his weekly column for the local newspaper, Necla resting on the sofa, explores the contention in their relationship in a scene lasting eighteen minutes. Not only does the frankness of the discussion capture the type of no-holds-barred honesty possible in familial relationships, it also demonstrates the impact embodied when there is seemingly no ‘action’ taking place.

Ceylan’s references to Chekhovian influences throughout the years potentially plays not only into the film as a whole, but also the theatricality Aydin embodies (himself once an aspiring thespian, not ‘actor’, as he corrects a guest on the appropriate term). The title of the film itself alludes to a frozen permanence, a Shakespearean “sleep of death” even. While mists turn to rain, and rain to snow, the relationships under scrutiny, likes branches stripped bare, become further exposed. As the characters face the complexities of each other and themselves, amidst the harsh winter, the explorations undertaken across Winter Sleep reveal a richness of character, if a cyclical inevitability in their circumstances.

Originally published on glasowfilm.org

Ebert, Roger (07/03/12) http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/once-upon-a-time-in-anatolia-2012

Bradshaw, Peter (13/11/14), http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/13/nuri-bilge-ceylan-winter-sleep

Klevan, Andrew (2000) Disclosure of the Everyday: undramatic achievement in narrative film, Trowbridge, Wiltshire: Flicks Books. p.12

Andrew, Geoff (06/02/2009) http://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/feb/06/nuri-bilge-ceylan-interview-transcript

Ceylan, Nuri Bilge (2014) http://www.nuribilgeceylan.com/photography/turkeycinemascope1.php?sid=1