Degrees of excellence

The show Future Classics was held Thursday night at Fruit on Humber Street.

Publicity Shot by Tom Lee for '99 Forever

The show was a premiere film screening for students from the BA Hons Television & Film Design course at Hull School of Art and Design. In attendance are filmmakers, friends and family and special invited guest Hugh Gordon.

The white walls of fruit are adorned with strings of lights, illuminating colourful eye- catching displays and the inner workings of a film student’s practice. Post-it notes with ‘mood’ words suggesting ideas and theme, sit beside scraps of fabric, stills from glamorous photo-shoots and everywhere business cards. Business cards pegged out or laid neatly in rows, tonight is the student’s chance to showcase their work and maybe pick up a few contacts and commissions.

On an adjoining table stands an old- fashioned film projector, a telescope and intriguingly a magnifying glass. There are bottles suggesting the chemicals used in film processing before the digital era. More pictures on the walls curiously depict cats and cattle and glamorous girls. Over the house speakers ragtime favourites play out as clips of film stars jive and jitterbug on the silver screen, all adding to the Classic Dapper ambience required by the dress code.

The first of tonight’s films was Real Eyes by Shona Singleton. The film wrestles with Orwellian themes of societal control and paranoia as we join a solitary data entry clerk in his tawdry life of routine and order. This was an ambitious film that played with the audience as it explored ideas of the watcher and the watched, the message in the bottle only serves to perplex the antagonist further and the audience.

I was left with more questions and answers in terms of understanding the narrative. The sound design by Michael Hirst was incredibly precise almost as if, the sound of the tap, the breaking glass, the rhythmic tapping of the keyboard, the alarm bell, were jumping out of the screen. There was hardly any dialogue throughout, which gave the film a very austere art-house feel with odd camera angles and shadowy facial shots.

The next finished work screened was Unrest by Adam Hill. This was another ambitious film exploring a father’s guilt as he tried to come to terms with tragedy. The director played around with time sequencing so it wasn’t easy to get things clear in your mind in the order they occurred. I was lucky to be sat across from the lead actor and he kindly answered some of these questions for me.

Early in the piece, coupled with the foreboding music, I was thinking; dank basement; man clutching a doll; it’s a macabre child abuse story; thankfully I was wrong. I liked the forest scenes, the position of the camera filling the screen with green, as the Father searched desperately for his child. The acting from the cast was good; the director appears to have been able to get more out of the actors than others managed. However the script suffered by the closing scene, a little saccharine sweet, a little cloying with bright lights and the use of the, I love you daddy a line so prevalent at the end of American family flicks.

So to the final film of the night this one directed by Olivia Young. ’99 Forever is a familiar tale of a young girl not wanting to grow up. It is cleverly set on New Years Eve 1999, on the cusp of the new millennium. With the paranoia over the Millennium Bug, the unbridled exuberance of celebrating the dawn of a new age, the promise of change and the possibilities of the future, all colliding on one night, one young girl doesn’t want 1999 to end. She places the morning newspaper announcing the end of the year in the bin, as a car drives past blaring out ‘Millennium’ on the stereo reminding her once more. It’s all too much; she can’t escape it;  she’s worried about growing up; scared of getting older: a feeling that is universal.

There are many reasons why this film works, not least the excellent soundtrack of nineties Britpop; Pulp, Cornershop and Robbie Williams soundtrack the drama. There is extraordinary attention to detail throughout; from the Pokemon cards, stick on bindis, SMTV with Ant and Dec and smearing your lippy with silvery stuff: for a moment it’s like the nineties never went away.

By using the inner dialogue as a voice over, the audience is given a way into the child’s mind, to hear all her thoughts and fears, and nod knowingly as she expresses all the same things they did at her age. ’99 Forever was a simple idea, well observed and beautifully interpreted; sometimes simplicity is key.

There were also show reels from Chris Ulliott and Tom Lee and a scene from House Wars (a work in progress) by Jonathan Webb being screened tonight. From these reels it became clear that the students had pooled their talents, and worked on each other’s projects, so accolades should go to the entire group for the three completed films.

On the strength of tonight’s screenings the graduates will have job offers and opportunities flooding in; they all have ambition, talent and fortitude in abundance.