Ever since the late Colin Welland collected his screenwriting Oscar for Chariots of Fire in 1982 and declared with a most un-British triumphalism that “The British are coming!”, such public displays of confidence in the country’s film industry have been uncommon, even frowned upon. Perhaps it is time to amend Welland’s cry this year and state the obvious: the British are here. In 2017, there have been more distinctive homegrown debut features funded, made and released, displaying a greater diversity of theme and focus, than in any other year in recent memory.
Previously it has been possible to identify small, localised pockets of new talent: think of 2006, when both Andrea Arnold (Red Road) and Paul Andrew Williams (London to Brighton) made their debuts, or 2008, which brought forth Steve McQueen (Hunger) and Joanna Hogg (Unrelated). This year feels more like an explosion. It isn’t only that promising new film-makers have emerged; it’s also the way in which their films have challenged and disrupted preconceptions about what British cinema and British stories might be.
The London Film Festival, which finishes its 10-day run on Sunday, has provided a focus for this crop of new British directors, three of whom were competing on Sunday night for the festival’s First Feature prize. Michael Pearce’s Beast is a tense Jersey-set thriller about the passionate romance between two outcasts, both damaged in their own way, one of whom may be a serial killer; at times it has the feral texture of a Bruno Dumont drama, at others it is closer to a rural Jagged Edge – Jersey Edge, perhaps. Also in competition was Apostasy, the Mancunian director Daniel Kokotajlo’s coiled study of life in a community of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Meanwhile, I Am Not a Witch, by the Welsh-Zambian newcomer Rungano Nyoni, veers between eerie, moving and satirical as it tells the story of a nine-year-old girl in a Zambian village who is forced to choose between admitting she is a witch, thereby dooming herself to the captive life of a tourist attraction, or being turned into a goat and set free.
These debuts come at the end of a thrilling year for new British cinema in which rural stories have predominated. Three acclaimed first features have been set far from the metropolitan whiff of sourdough and miles from the nearest yoga studio. Francis Lee’s film God’s Own Country is an earthy gay love story about a taciturn young farmer who falls for a Romanian labourer; William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth is a period drama in which a put-upon young woman responds with murderous fury to the deprivations of married life, while Hope Dickson Leach’s The Levelling is set in the aftermath of the 2014 Somerset floods. Leach, who was raised in Hong Kong before moving to Edinburgh, has blamed the concentration of capital for the former London bias of the British film industry. “I think rich, middle-class people tend to live in London,” she said earlier this year. “They tend to be the people who make films – and also go to see them. So there’s a lack of belief that anyone would be interested in rural stories.” Happily, the box office is proving her wrong: God’s Own Country and Lady Macbeth have been commercial hits, with the former also winning prizes at the Edinburgh and Dinard film festivals.
Even those debut directors who haven’t abandoned city life altogether are still finding innovative ways to tell their stories. Spaceship, directed by Alex Taylor and released earlier this year, is a beguiling tale of suspected extraterrestrial abduction in Aldershot, full of hallucinatory visuals on a shoestring budget. And the recent Daphne, directed by the Scottish filmmaker Peter Mackie Burns, is a finely-detailed character study of a woman in her early thirties failing conspicuously to hold her life together after witnessing a stabbing. “I wanted to look at what you do when you become the person you’ve been pretending to be,” Burns tells me. “Daphne is too cool for school but now she’s reached the age where she’s too old for that and the film is about her coming to this realisation.”
Burns is no new kid on the block himself – he turned 50 this year (two years older than fellow first-timer, Francis Lee) and has already had two previous features fall at the final hurdle, the first in 2008 when funding collapsed after the financial crisis. “I had to believe it would happen eventually. Otherwise what would I do?” Daphne, which he expanded from a short film made with the same writer (Nico Mensinga) and star (Emily Beecham), came together quickly when the production company The Bureau, which specialises in working with emerging film-makers, was looking for a feature to fill a schedule hole. “The stars were in alignment,” Burns notes. “The fact we could say, ‘Here’s the short, the star, the character and the first draft’ really helped us.” The film’s unique tone, with scenes that weave unpredictably through comedy, melancholy and menace, was also intact. “It’s that Chekhovian mix of laughing through the tears that we were aiming for.”
Part of the film’s funding came from the BFI, which distributes National Lottery money and instigated diversity directives in 2014 to establish a plurality of stories, perspectives and talent. The “three ticks” initiative, set up to “recognise and acknowledge the quality and value of difference”, asked a series of questions of all productions seeking funding, such as, “Is the project telling us something we do not already know?” and, “Does the project have the potential to open doors which have historically been closed?” The directives have been rolled out to other UK funding bodies, including Creative England, Ffilm Cymru Wales and Northern Ireland Screen, and has had a demonstrable effect in the representation of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability and geography, though Burns chuckles gently when I raise the subject.
“Diversity was certainly discussed in terms of cast and crew on Daphne. But we were shooting in Elephant and Castle [in south London] so we couldn’t really avoid telling a diverse story unless we were making some strange, Notting Hill-esque fantasy, you know?”
Pearce, who is 36, also received BFI money for Beast. “There’s been a desire for diversity for a long time so it’s not just film-makers from London all the time,” he says. “And when you look at a lot of the current directors – Rungano grew up in Zambia and Wales, Francis in West Yorkshire, Dan who did Apostasy was born in Manchester, me in Jersey.
“Some of them are autobiographical, but they’re all concerned with returning to something fundamental about where we came from. These films can’t help but be sincere but that doesn’t mean they can’t also be ambitious. It’s not just a story about your first kiss. They can be intimate but there’s also a real sense of scope.” That informed the visual sweep of Beast, in which the bristly landscape feels indivisible from the characters: this is in every respect the place that made them. Pearce agrees that this extends to his own feelings about growing up in Jersey. “I always had this impression of the duality of the place as a child. There was this idea that it could be a beautiful playground but also somewhere that could be stifling and suffocating.”
That is as good a description as any for Britain in the shadow of Brexit. The next batch of diverse British films may already on its way to the screen – the thriller Retreat, directed by Ted Evans, a deaf film-maker, will be the first British feature entirely in sign language, while Dawn Of The Dark Fox is co-written and co-directed by Michael Smith, who is on the autistic spectrum. But the wave after that will surely be the one to deal in cinematic terms with the churning issue of Brexit.
“It has thrown up such big questions,” Pearce says. “What is this great divide between people who felt European and those who felt distinctly British? I’m expecting film-makers to look into that divide – what is it and when did it become so big? It might not be as literal as dramatising Brexit, it might be some of us decide to go further back, try to figure out what this Anglo-Saxon identity is and what it means now we live in such interconnected times.”
Burns agrees that its effect will be palpable. “It’s going to hit funding and it will squeeze everything. And it’s going to affect the stories too. Then again, as Nina Simone said: ‘It’s an artist’s duty to reflect the times.’”
Daphne and God’s Own Country are on release. I Am Not a Witch opens on Friday. Apostasy and Beast will be released next year.
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