Fellow Travellers #2

Posted up on the web is an interview with Amiel Courtin-Wilson about the film Bastardy which he directed, produced by Philippa Campey. Congrats to them and to Jack. Film is playing on limited release at the moment, they're onlining a TV version today, and it is the kind of film that you just know, deep in your heart will have a long lingering life.

You can watch the trailer in an earlier blog listing here.

You can also see a great Q&A with Jack and Amiel here on SlowTV, a brilliant online channel maintained by peep and collab Nick Feik.

Thinking of films like this, and at the same time watching the daily battles with the pressure of local box office figures (usually a killer sucker punch at the end of a very long journey) it's hard not to want a film like Bastardy to be on a path toward the kind of life that Brian McKenzie's docos have had. I know that there are numerous folks around who covet his films - like On the Waves of the Adriatic or Winter's Harvest - as the small pristine gems of cinema that, largely unheralded, unwatched and unwanted, are a very pure manifestation of why you would ever bother doing what it is we're trying to do. They touch you. They linger with you. They show you something you might never have seen, in that it is fleeting, intimate, but also of a time and place that is specific to the lives and desires of the people involved. One of these days one of the distributors will do a magnificent box set of his films, promote the living shit out of it, and all of our faith in humanity will be restored, the earth will shift onto it's axis again and people will once again start talking about films instead of marketable products. Meh.