Monday, July 16, 2007

Social Realist Cinema: Of Shane Meadows and Pawel Pawlikowski

I spent Friday the 13th of this month (the date was purely coincidental!) in Oxford at a film conference "The Realist Impulse", where I gave a presentation on the films of Shane "This is England/TwentyFourSeven/Dead Man's Shoes/A Room for Romeo Brass" Meadows.

Among the delegates was film-maker Pawel Pawlikowski, director of two recent British flicks of note, The Last Resort and My Summer of Love, both coincidentally starring Paddy Considine, a long-time associate of the aforementioned Mr Meadows. A colourful and highly energetic character by all accounts, Pawel made some priceless contributions to the discussions and played some excerpts from his forthcoming film The Restraint of Beasts, based on the award-winning novel by Magnus Mills.

4 comments:

Julia Buckley said...

Dead Man's Shoes has haunted possibly more than any other film. It's an interesting piece of work, but I kind of wish I'd never watched it!

Lady Fotherington-Smethers said...

I think what Julia says applies to his films in general - I have seen 'Romeo Brass', 'My Summer of Love' and 'This is England' and it was impossible to switch off and stop watching but yet I wasn't really enjoying the films - I guess this is real 'reality TV'!!!

And ggd on you for doing the presetation Ciaran - maybe you should become a lecturer in film studies???

CW said...

Yes, it's a fascinating film, Julia and certainly quite disturbing in parts. All the more remarkable for the shoestring budget it was made on and the cast of relatively unknown actors.

Lady FS - Stranger things have happened!

Lady Fotherington-Smethers said...

Indeed they have CW£ but you need a PhD before becoming a lecturer so get started!!!