London Video Productions

Telma Dias has written a short script on the subject of mental illness & submitted it to the BFI Shorts 2012 scheme, managed by the digital culture agency Lighthouse which has been set up to help young creative talents in the film industry.

She is a young filmmaker here at the company. She has been with us since mid 2011 & is very much at home behind the camera. She is currently hard at work at work on her film about racism in football which is a big concern for her. She loves the game but not the ugly face of racism.

It was suggested to Telma that she work on a documentary about mental illness. She is interested in the subject generally & feels deeply about those so afflicted although she herself isn’t assailed with such demons. But Telma felt that a drama film would be more appropriate to draw attention to the problems inherent in mental illness than a documentary would be. She felt that in films on the subject generally there is too much extraneous information about the other characters & not enough attention given to the sufferer herself. This is what her script addresses.  We see how events have driven the main character to her state of breakdown & what happens to her when she seeks help.

We follow a young woman experiencing a breakdown. One of those dark nights of the soul that some of us sometimes feel might be about to occur to us. It is a powerful piece of writing script; the script is tense & tight. It goes from one crisis to another from one revelation to another.  Much is revealed about the main character during the film & the ending is cataclysmic. It is a powerful piece of work. In the way that the drama moves at breakneck speed, there is something in it of Alfred Jarry’s masterpiece Ubu Roi.

This is the link for the BFI / Lighthouse scheme

http://www.lighthouse.org.uk/bfi-shorts-2012/about-bfi-shorts-2012

In February 2009, InFactuation Productions attended a conference at South Africa House. The ghosts of Apartheid were still there. It was a grey forbidding building outside, austere inside, built when the empire ruled a lot of the World. South Africa was one of the Dominions like Canada, Australia, New Zealand & as it was then Rhodesia. They were countries where the white man had gone & totally usurped the indigenous population bringing new diseases & subjugation.

South Africa House is on the East Side of Trafalgar Square. Trafalgar Square used to be a focal point of demonstrations against Apartheid system, the much hated system which literally translates as separate development but in practice meant that the majority black population had no rights, were not allowed to enter white areas, had to have their identity pass on them all the time.

When Africa was tribal, artificial boundaries were created as a result of the colonial powers, mainly Britain, Belgium & France carving up the continent.

The conference was the precursor to the G8 becoming the G20. There was much hope around that finally the World would act as one. Poverty & disease especially AIDS in Africa is an enduring & intractable problem which the west has alternately done nothing or not enough to help alleviate & much hand wringing has taken place on the issue. The failure of the West to do enough to help Africa is shameful.

Many speakers including Fred Harrison a Researcher Director,Jakob Von Uexoll founder of the Right Livelihood Awards and Cherie Blair, married to former Prime Minister Tony Blair among many other agree that Africa is exploited by developed countries & by China.

What all these people had in common was that they recognised that the World is not full of injustices but is run in an unjust way. The issue of land is an interesting one. Without land people are not empowered. Food & shelter comes from land. Some land is more fertile than other land. In Amazonia for example is not generally good land. Land can be rural or urban. For agriculture there is good land & non fertile land.

It was a great experience to go back there and I look forward going back again.