trailer trash

Clowns

In an age where technology allows us to capture people’s attention with sophisticated special effects, animation and sound design, it is people, and not post-production artistry, that holds our interest and ultimately our minds. During the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s, the impact of the UK’s BBC News coverage on the disaster was helped because of images and stories of individuals, not just the scale of the events which were unfolding. However grim the reality, however many people were dying, it was only when the public could connect to a few people in the sea of human misery that donations began to poor in to aid agencies.

Next week’s Clowns and this week’s Overbooked, are about happier events on a much smaller scale, but the same basic rules apply. The difference is that filmmakers had to gradually win the trust of the contributors so that gentle humour, complexity of chararacter and even tragedy are revealed in a surprising way.

Both films are also shot with small handheld semi-professional cameras by the directors - there is no crew, no extra lighting, no trappings of glossy production techniques. “Reality TV” is often a by-word for simplistic, crude human dramas which are manufactured by the filmmakers to fill airtime as well as the front pages of popular newspapers and magazines. There’s nothing wrong with disposable entertainment, but films like these show that given a different set of circumstances, “cheap” storytelling doesn’t have to result in manipulative, caricatured portrayals of the world we live in.

One of the boys featured in 'Chosen'

Brian Woods is one of Britain’s most consistently excellent film makers. With his company True Vision, Brian has documented important issues both in the UK and around the word, especially telling stories of the dispossessed or those without a voice. His great skill is getting vulnerable people to talk to the camera, and Chosen demonstrates that ability to the max.

Three men, Tom, Alistair and Mark, were sexually abused at their private school in the 1970s. Their lives were scarred by those events. Finally,they felt ready to speak and seek justice. The story is told simply through their individual testimony to camera, filmed against a plain background, and illustrated with photographs.

The film was not originally intended to be feature length, but the compelling details hold you spellbound as the three men describe in clear and articulate language the method of their abusers. For the first time I fully understood how grooming works, and how it can be a long, slow process, building the trust of the victims and creating a feeling of complicity which locks the abused into keeping it secret.

Tom has now launched a campaign to try and ensure that child protection works effectively, and that parents are given all the necessary information about the often closed world of boarding schools that their children grow up in:  Questions4Schools.

Chosen was the winner of this year’s best documentary BAFTA, and is a timely reminder that compelling film making doesn’t need elaborate reconstruction, effects and formatting – just a great story, brilliantly told.

Managing Director Nick