Category Archives: Projects & Programmes

Peru

Tomorrow I head off on the next big challenge – the establishment of a Film Commission for Peru. (This will be my fourth continent for film commission set up.) I’ll be working with the fabulous folks from PromPeru, the promotion agency, and we’ll be looking at the business plan and roll out of a new Film Commission initiative over the next 12-18 months. We’ll also be looking at regional offices in Piura, Iquitos on the Amazon, and Cusco in the Andes. And yes, I am going to Macchu Pichu. I am more excited than I’m letting on.

Peru

Coriolanus

Coriolanus is the grim tale of a war-hardened hero who’s forced to play the charming “people’s politician” – a role for which he’s disastrously ill-equipped. Undermined in this uncomfortable, pandering role by two scheming tribunes, and, to be honest, by his own pride, he’s cast out of Rome, where he ultimately joins forces with Rome’s sworn enemy.

Through my relationship with beloved Film in Serbia, Coriolanus is the project I’ve probably had most proactive interest in as a Film Commissioner in recent years. It’s taken a long, long time for me to get to see it, but finally here it is, in all its war-torn glory……….

So is it any good? Well, true, it’s not the easiest of Shakespeare’s plays. It is instead rather densely political, and the characters are all rather manipulative and unredeemingly unlikeable (Vanessa Redgrave is vicious as his monstrous mother). But the cast is excellent, the cinematography is truly first class, and the decaying Serbian locations look suitably war torn. I even liked the real-life news footage of the storming of parliament during the overthrow of Milosevic, which paints an uneasy portrait of a nation in turmoil. So: good? yes. Great? maybe not quite, but not through lack of trying.

Gettysburg

Still with my American History theme, it was Memorial Day and the much vaunted Ridley-and-Tony-Scott brother’s History Channel docudrama Gettysburg was on tv. So how do you cram three days of fighting and more than 50,000 dead in one of the most bloody and revered battles of the Civil War into two hours of Prime Time entertainment for a nation that is in fact actually at war?

Viscerally, is how. Although there are plenty of facts and diagrams and talking head academics, the Scotts mostly go for blood, guts and CGI gore. This was the world’s first technological conflict, so we see rifle butts smash into skulls, grooved bullets rip into thighs, eardrums shatter from the loudness of canon-fire, tin cans whistle and explode overhead allowing tiny ball-bearings tear through tens of men – think Black Hawk Down with bayonets and no anesthetic. I get that they were trying to remind us of the brutality, the dehumanization of war. Except I’m not sure, in this video-game age, that this is not distracting, rather than thought-provoking. Anyway. For what it’s worth, it filmed in Cape Town, South Africa.

Incidentally, also, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the (highly highly recommended) blogger with The Atlantic who is currently undertaking a very nuanced and personal educational journey into the manifestation of American slavery, exposed me to something I really did not know: the origin of Memorial Day as an honoring of Union dead by the black community of Charleston. Astounding. Astounding also that it’s been largely forgotten.

The Location Guide Interview

James Peak of The Location Guide talks to AFCI caretaker manager Martin Cuff about his appointment and plans:

After the unexpected departure of CEO Larry Brownell, the Association of Film Commissioners has a new caretaker manager. Martin Cuff is an economics expert based in Cape Town, South Africa. So the most American of institutions has hired someone outside Hollywood? Who is this guy, and what is he doing? And is he interested in the job on a permanent basis?

A beautifully polite voice answers the phone and explains that she will fetch Mr Cuff immediately. Martin’s secretary this evening is his 12-year-old daughter, as I have inadvertently phoned him at home. However, he is delighted to give me a few minutes to set the record straight about what happens next with the AFCI.

Martin is a film sector specialist: “I have a small business that specialises in establishing and mentoring film commissions around the world. I’ve run film commissions and film permit offices on two continents. I was the first African representative to be voted onto the AFCI board. I’m the only foreigner to ever have been hired in to run a US state film commission….

Click here for more.

Hanna

Hanna is a frustratingly inconsistent film. Part fairy tale, part campy Bourne Identity, part Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday, its unevenly paced and every single actor is forced into some inexplicably unwieldy accent or other. It’s about super-kids, if that’s not giving away too much of the plot, and it felt to me a bit uncomfortable, like watching child abuse. Saoirse Ronan is good though, I’ll give her that (though like The Child, I kept wanting to tell her to tie her hair back). Olivia Williams is in it too, so there’s a bit of proper elocution, finally.

And I’m delighted to say that the locations are one of the best thing in the entire film. One of the earlier locations used is the severe, concrete site of the Berlin Windkanal – the Nazis’ aerodynamic testing windtunnel – a site that appeared in ons eie Charlize’s Aeon Flux (and was in turn the movie location that started me on the road to writing this blog.) The other-worldly abandoned amusement park is an actual site in the former East Germany called Spree Park; the owners shipped all the funfair rides off to Peru (honest) and ended up as cocaine smugglers. You can’t make this up. They left the dinosaurs and mammoths behind to slowly decay, like some post-apocalyptic Creation Museum in Boondocks, Kentucky.