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SOME STORIES This 85 minute documentary is about the work of the Narrative 4 organisation. It follows three days in November 2018 when 15 English teenagers from Birmingham met 15 Irish teenagers in Limerick for a 'story exchange workshop' designed to create empathy. Emotional, intense and powerful, this workshop was run by Ruth Gilligan and James Lawlor. SOME STORIES was directed and edited by Rob Stone, and filmed by Jimmy Hay and Will McKeown. It features songs by Kathleen Turner and music by Will McKeown. The project came about when Ruth and I met for coffee in Birmingham New Street nation to discuss something else, and Ruth described her work for Narrative 4 with such enthusiasm that the opportunity to film this event in Limerick was irresistible. Pulling in Will McKeown, a PhD research student at the university of Birmingham with camera experience and musical expertise, and Dr Jimmy Hay, a seasoned filmmaker and previous PhD student of mine, who now teaches filmmaking at the University of Bristol, we set about planning the shoot, gave up, and flew by the seat of our pants instead. Limerick in late November is not the warmest place to be, but the energy of the Birmingham teenagers was quickly matched by that of the Limerick teenagers and both sets aspired to the dynamism of Ruth. With no idea of what to expect, our initial plan of passing the two cameras between the three of us was abandoned and I stepped up to direct the thing instead. Luckily both Will and Jimmy knew how to handle a camera, with Jimmy especially eloquent when pulling focus, and we reacted to everything that was happening, making countless on-the-spot decisions about what to film and how to film it. Exhilarating and exhausting, we ended up with several memory cards full of footage and five months of editing to make the 7 May 2019 premiere set for the Electric Cinema in Birmingham. Editing on an iMac equipped with Final Cut Pro, with Will sending music tracks via messenger, was immensely enjoyable but plagued with ethical problems caused by what to cut and the dangers of mis-representing the participants. But it reached 85 minutes very organically and ended with a flourish, Jimmy having grabbed the camera during the final lunch and filmed the whole group singing, thereby gifting me a single shot that played behind the credits. Music editing continued and the University of Birmingham pitched in the funds to make a digital cinema package that arrived just in time for the premiere. It was a relief to see the film played well in the cinema, especially because the audience included most of the participants and many colleagues. Nobody felt misrepresented, lots of people cried, and Jimmy and Will both came away impressed with their work, as well they should. SOME STORIES is a bit rough at the edges but that only serves to play up the immediacy of what is happening onscreen. The participants were all amazing and capturing their stories on film was a privilege that is still hard to believe. There are scenes and shots that I like a lot and even love a little. The montage of the couples sharing stories all over the building set to Will’s original music is probably the standout, but there are also shots like the massive close-up of Farzana in the final story exchange that make me forget all the work that went into the film and marvel at the power of the image. SOME STORIES played in the Electric Cinema a year after the events depicted in November 2019 and shortly afterwards I released it in HQ on Vimeo. In June 2020 it was screened as part of the Changing The Story International Online Film Festival. In November 2019 it screened as part of the Being Human: Festival of the Humanities organised by the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The links below are to the original trailer, the eight-minute excerpt that Ruth showed at the Hay Festival in 2019, the full-length HQ documentary, and a brief excerpt from the round table with five of the participants that Ruth chaired after the screening in November 2019. |
Click on the screens to watch on Vimeo
THE COMPLETE HQ DOCUMENTARY (1:25:54)
Original Trailer (2:21) Excerpt shown at Hay Festival (7:57) Post-Screening Round Table (1:51)
BASQUE HERITAGE CINEMA
BASQUE HERITAGE CINEMA (34:38) came out of the overlap of two research projects. The first was the Leverhulme Fellowship that allowed me to spend two year sin the Basque Country and the second was the project on European heritage cinema with Paul Cooke. Our research assistant on that project, Axel Bangert, came over with a camera and we spent a few days travelling around the Basque Country and filming. It took several months to edit and it offers a survey and reflection on representations of heritage in Basque cinema with three interviews and shots of Basque landscapes too. It screened by invitation at the universities of Cambridge, Pamplona and Bangor and at the Belfast Film Festival in 2014. Click the screen or here.
