Nina Forever is constructed around a single elegant metaphor. Depressed supermarket employee Rob (Cian Barry), still mourning the death of his girlfriend, begins an uncertain relationship with his co-worker Holly (Abigail Hardingham), but whenever they try to have sex Nina (Fiona O'Shaughnessy) comes back to life to harangue the couple. The internal is made physical: Rob's grief assumes physical form, and it's that of the loved one he's lost, appearing naked, bloody and sardonic at the symbolic event of him attempting to moving on

With its ambitious visual language and sensitive depiction of bereavement, Nina Forever is the striking feature debut of Chris and Ben Blaine. We spoke to the brothers about lost loves and the benefits of close collaboration. 

Bereavement is a sad, dramatic topic, but the film is also funny with horrific elements. Was it difficult to balance that tonally?

Chris Blaine: Not really. Partly it's a function of how we write, in a variety of different moods all at once, but I think it came out of our experience of grief. Often in films grief is the bit where you're sad and you look at the dead leaves and you go for a walk by yourself, and we both found that it was incredibly sad but also weirdly funny and terrifying. You have this strange embarrassment and almost magnetic sense of feeling everything all at once.

Ben Blaine: You also feel incredibly horny because you've lost someone and there's this big gap. So much of it is that presence of the person, their touch and their feel and their smell, so you've just got this desire and you kind of latch on to the next person that you see. I think Rob does that, where he's not jumping into this thing because he's thought about it, but because there's something deep within that craves the attention of someone else. He's lacking it from the person he really wants to still be there.

So many of Nina Forever's most crucial scenes take place during sex scenes that are using lots of practical effects. There's blood everywhere and the cast are all naked, and you're trying to tell an emotional story. How did you accomplish that?

BB: It was a challenge but one we knew we were getting into, and I think it was one of the things that excited us about making the film. We liked the idea of these scenes where the characters are totally honest and everything is absolutely stripped away both physically and emotionally. It was very difficult, that mixture of sex scenes with naked actors and the technical challenge of it all, but the emotions gave us something to steer us through. We could focus in on that, so we knew where our priorities were in the scenes. We knew that what really mattered was that the audience understands how these people are feeling, and as long as we were getting that we were on the right course.

As a film-making team how do you divide your labour? Do you do tasks together or do they naturally separate?

CB: In terms of writing we used to try to do individual passes of scripts, but we found that the best thing for us was to be in the same room and to talk about it constantly, and that's kind of how we do things all the way through to the edit. It's really liquid and it's not like there are assigned jobs. We slowly but surely we keep improving on each other's ideas because we're talking about the ideas rather than the words on the page.

BB: It's easy to fall in love with the way you've written something, and easy therefore to forget that no-one's going to see the script. The script is a blueprint and often not a particularly useful one, and so we find ways to talk about the ideas that we're actually going to put to the audience. Similarly that fluidity extends to the actors and the crew. It becomes a creative space for everybody who works with us, and anyone can come up with ideas.

That makes a lot of sense: the creative process starts as a conversation rather than the choices of a single person, and so it can easily expand.

CB: We really enjoy that. It's one of the things about film-making that's so great, the fact that you're working with loads of other people and it's not just you on your own. You've got a full cast and crew around you and crew who are all coming up with magical stuff and it makes the work and the experience so much better.

Nina Forever is available on DVD and Blu-ray from 22^nd February. For a chance to win a copy courtesy of the Blaine Brothers, head over to our Facebook page and leave a comment on the post. The film will also screen at select cinemas throughout the month: https://www.ourscreen.com/film/nina-forever. 

Images: Fetch Publicity

It is not a coincidence that A Bigger Splash takes place on a volcanic island: the film is comprised of dormant passions, waiting to erupt.

David Kajganich's adaptation of the sensual 1969 thriller La Piscine follows rock star Marianne (Tilda Swinton) and her recovering alcoholic boyfriend Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) as their blissful holiday is soured by the unwelcome, sexually provocative intrusion of her ex Harry (Ralph Fiennes) and his new-found daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson).

As its foursome flirt and fight, the film throbs with intense, volatile emotion: it is also not a coincidence that in person its director Luca Guadagnino is similarly animated.

One of the central ideas of A Bigger Splash is the conflict between two ways of living: a traditional hedonistic rock and roll lifestyle, which is embodied by Harry, and a contemporary sort of clean living which Paul and Marianne are attempting to pursue. Why were you interested in exploring that divide? You put me in a place in which I feel uncomfortable because you're asking me to give my own explanation of the film, which I am not very eager to do generally. I think the audience should make a judgement by themselves. I would say that the idea of nostalgia and wanting to get back what you've lost is something that I always think about, and in these characters you have that clash, a kind of battle between wills. It's a very universal, powerful dynamic.

When you have characters who have opposing philosophies, as a director do you take a side or is it important to be sensitive to both points of view? A director should never judge their characters. It's a disgrace if you do that. You should be as open as possible, as broad as possible and you should be able to invest in every act the characters make without judging them ever. If you judge your characters you're putting yourself on top of them and it's a disaster.

The characters are all driven by desire for each other--We all are. Aren't you?

Yes, certainly. I thought it was notable however that there's this struggle where each character wants someone else sexually, and is motivated by this. But this is exactly what we are bound to, so I wanted to make a movie about something that people can absolutely recognise in their own lives, even if they're not rock stars.

Due to an operation on her throat, Marianne is almost entirely silent and has to express herself in other ways. Was that a challenge to depict? Not when you have a great performer like Tilda Swinton. In general, no, because I think that people behave and communicate not just with words, but with the position they take in physical space. You are communicating much more through the position of your feet right now than by anything you're saying, in my opinion. A director is someone who has to be very attentive of behaviour and try to capture everything that comes as communication, whether in words or physically.

The original film La Piscine was set on the French Riviera which is warm but cool, while A Bigger Splash takes place on the island of Pantelleria, where there's the intense Sirocco wind. Was shifting the location a key decision for you? It started everything. When I said I'm going to do this movie based on La Piscine, I had to move the action to an island. I needed the movie to be set adrift and for the environment to challenge the characters. I didn't need a luxurious backdrop. That doesn't interest me, I hate it.

What would you say is the biggest difference between the original version and yours? I haven't seen that movie. I saw it only when I was 16, so I don't know what to say.

Do you think it's a better approach to adapt a film from a distant memory rather than looking at it closely? I was just working from the concept that there were two couples: one father and daughter and one new couple. That was my memory of what was in the movie. The writer may have seen it again but I didn't. I remember there was a moment in La Piscine in which Alain Delon slashes Romy Schneider with a branch, but we don't have any slashing in this movie.

You also altered the title to A Bigger Splash, which is the name of a David Hockney painting that depicts a splash of water as someone dives into a swimming pool. Why did you change the name from a location to the consequence of an action? The pool isn't the important point, the point is the clash. I'd much rather focus on the action rather than the concept of the pool itself.  I also wanted, in my megalomania, to buy that painting when I was young. Somehow I feel I now possess it in a way because it's the title of my movie.

A Bigger Splash is released on 12^th February.

Told through the eyes of Alexander (Jeremy Chabriel), an eleven year old on the cusp of discovering his own moral compass, Ariel Kleiman's debut film Partisan is a cautionary tale about the effects dogma can have on vulnerable minds.

Alexander's father Gregori (Vincent Cassel) is a charismatic ringleader of a closed community made up of eight seemingly abandoned mothers and their offspring. Children are shielded from the dangers of the outside world and warned that curiosity can create vicious fires. Denied permission to wander, they barely leave Gregori's side, except when he sends them out on assassination missions.

Although extreme, at its heart Partisan is a story about the inevitable moment when every child realises the adults around them are fundamentally flawed. It's heartbreaking and quietly fantastic.

We sat down with Ariel to talk about innocence lost, growing pains, and casting Vincent Cassel as the lead in his first feature.

What inspired you to create Partisan?

The original spark came from an article in the New York Times about child assassins in Colombia. Everything I’ve made has been inspired by an image, and in this case it was literally the image of a child gunning down a man. Not only was it disturbing, it was so surreal and absurd. I immediately knew I wanted to turn that gut reaction into a film, but I didn’t feel I was the right person to make that specific story about Colombia. What I was more interested in was the human drama behind the crime: the tragedy of adults passing their insecurities and fears onto children.

The film has an ambiguity that adds an almost magical element. You don’t state where it’s set, or in which time period. Why leave those details out?

I didn’t see this movie as being a realist work. I wanted it to feel more like a myth, or a fable. A lot of fables use extreme characters and stories to tell tales about very ordinary things. At most points, for example, Gregori is incredibly paternally motivated. That’s what Vincent connected with most in the script: many of Gregori's anxieties and motivations are scarily relatable.

Another big inspiration was the decision to tell the story from Alexander’s perspective. He’s growing up with blinkers on. Like any child experiences, as you grow up the blinkers slowly widen, and it can be a mind-altering experience, realising that the adults in your life are just people too.

It was great to see Jeremy Chabriel, this tiny person, holding his own against an actor like Cassel. How did you find him?

That was really daunting. When I wrote the script, I was pretty naive. Then it got to a point where I thought, “Shit, how are we going to find this boy?!” He’s the hero of the film, he's in pretty much every scene, and he has to go up against Vincent. We knew we needed someone remarkable and ended up finding Jeremy through a French school in Sydney. He’s a very sensitive young man. He’d never acted before and his audition tape was shot on a really average camera, but his eyes just kind of glowed and he held himself with this real maturity.

The other child actors weren’t all stretched in quite the same way, but as director you still had to communicate the story to them. Given the difficult nature of the film, how did you accomplish that?

Jeremy read the whole screenplay and knew what was happening, but we mainly kept the other children away from the themes. They were all so different, each with their own big imagination and personality. One girl would hug my leg every morning and wouldn’t let go, and there was another who was always asking when he was going to get more lines. Overall the girls were very easy to work with, very professional. The boys, on the other hand, were mainly troublemakers, pouncing around the place.

What was your thinking behind commissioning musicians like Jarvis Cocker and Metronomy to record original faux 1980s pop songs?

When we wrote the script and started to shoot the film it just didn't feel right to use pop songs that existed in our world, because people have existing memories associated with them. The setting is constructed as this nowhere land, so we went about crafting pop songs that would have been hits in our no man’s land, pop classics that no one has ever heard of. I basically made a list of artists I’d love to see tackle that brief, and amazingly, some of them said yes.

One of those numbers, “The Hardest Thing To Do”, is sung by Alexander at karaoke. The music video made for it is so much fun to watch – so ridiculous and reflective of 80s styling. Where did the idea come from?

I got a good friend who I knew could bring the cheese to make those videos. We talked a lot about a need to make them feel realistic.

The karaoke scene in the film was actually inspired by my travels in Asia. We were travelling through Vietnam and were lucky enough to be invited over for dinner by a Vietnamese family. After dinner, they had this ritual where they all huddle around the TV to sing karaoke. The kids sang with such sincerity and deep emotion. These songs were about love and heartbreak and whatever adult pop songs are about, but somehow it was incredibly powerful.

What was Vincent like on set? Partisan is your first feature film, so working with such an established actor must have felt exciting?

He was a nightmare. Really difficult and arrogant.

No, he’s a special, special guy. The second he came on set, you felt the energy of the whole crew shift. Everyone wanted to be at the top of their game, and he made everyone feel more confident. I’ve seen him portray menace and threat and foreboding, and he does do all of that effortlessly, but some of my favourite moments of him on-screen are tender and vulnerable. Those sad, insecure moments. The way he brought those aspects of Gregori’s character to life was really something.

Partisan is released in U.K. cinemas on 8th January.

Images: Metrodome

One of the great pleasures of working for Oh Comely – aside from the baked goods that materialise in the office with delicious regularity – is that I get to watch excellent films and then speak to the people who made them. Therefore, when asked to write about 2016 in cinema, I thought that instead of rounding up my favourite films of the year* I would instead share some of the film-maker interviews that I most enjoyed doing. I've cheated by also including an interview with Big Bird performer Carroll Spinney, but given that he tells an anecdote about the time he hugged Snuffleupagus so hard they both cried with joy, I hope you'll forgive me.

(*Spoiler for the results of that hypothetical event: Carol would win, with The Lobster, 45 Years and The Look of Silence tussling for silver. Have you seen Carol yet? Go and see Carol.)

Peter Strickland – The Duke of Burgundy

https://ohcomely.co.uk/blog/1058

“For me, the film is about consent and how that veers into compromise and eventually coercion. Everyone likes to think they don't coerce their partner. Compromise is an issue within every element of a relationship, not just the sexual parts – if a couple decides to start a family, one person will possibly have to compromise on a job they might love. I'm not an agony aunt, but you can apply the film beyond the bedroom.”

Ruben Östlund – Force Majeure

https://ohcomely.co.uk/blog/1087

“We have a culture today where we're allowed to put 99% of our time and concern into our relationships. There's something about this lifestyle that creates existential crises. We feel like love should be a problem, and we hear it in pop music over and over again. In movies, on television, it's all relationship challenges. As long as we have that kind of focus for our lives we won't be able to look at society's problems from a proper perspective. I wanted to question that.”

Caroll Spinney – I Am Big Bird

https://ohcomely.co.uk/blog/1089

“I decided about two months in that he should be a child. For the first few months he was just a goofy guy, a real yokel. He'd become fairly popular just as a novelty, but when I made him a kid he suddenly embodied something that a lot of children could identify with: the struggle to be a child in an adult world.”

Olivier Assayas – Clouds of Sils Maria

https://ohcomely.co.uk/blog/1101

“Juliette and I are friends but we're not that familiar or intimate – I've never known what her everyday life is like. I know her but I also fantasise her. I imagine things about her. Some of them are true, some are totally off the mark. So when I'm writing a character like Maria Enders I know that I'm playing with my own assumptions as well as the assumptions of the audience, the way the audience imagines her. I'm playing on this border between fiction and reality.”

Alecky Blythe – London Road

https://ohcomely.co.uk/blog/1107

“We knew about the tragedies, which was a story that was clearly told in the media, but not the fallout. There were people who weren't in the eye of the storm whose lives had been affected too. Obviously this was to a much lesser degree than the family members of the victims, but I saw there were wider repercussions in the community that seemed to resonate. I was compelled by this, and these people wanted to share their experiences with me. It seemed like a story that wasn't being told.”

Desiree Akhavan – Appropriate Behaviour

https://ohcomely.co.uk/blog/1147

“That's the worst: when you hold on to the nostalgia for a moment you had two hours ago, hoping that the person will go back to your first impression of them. That happens quite often and I don't see it depicted in movies. Films lied to me about sex, and everything I learned about sex until a certain age I'd learned from watching a movie. It wasn't a conversation I had with my parents or something I could find out on my own. When I finally started dating I realised I'd been fed fairytale lies about simultaneous orgasms and never-ending love. ”

For the past three decades Guy Maddin has operated on the farthest reaches of cinema, employing the film-making techniques of silent and early films in service of creating intoxicating, blissfully confusing works. The late Roger Ebert, as he often did, summed Guy up perfectly: 'You have never seen a film like this before, unless you have seen other films by Guy Maddin.'

Guy's latest work, The Forbidden Room, is his most ambitious to date: growing out of an online project to recreate lost films, it is a compendium of stories that travels deeper and deeper within itself.

A strange, sexy and comic sensorial assault, The Forbidden Room is almost certainly the only film ever to feature the dream of a murdered man's moustache, or a story told by a character's deceased ex-boyfriend who has transformed into a blackened banana. Ahead of its release today, we spoke to Guy about raising the dead.

What was the genesis of The Forbidden Room?

Back in late 2010 I had started this internet interactive project called Seances, without any notion that The Forbidden Room might ever exist. The plan was to shoot in public my own adaptations of about 100 lost movies or lost movie fragments, and I'd lined up a few museums where I'd do this. It would be financed through Telefilm Canada, this fantastically generous state-run film funding body, but it involved them bending their rules to go beyond their maximum allowable grants for new media projects. It was essentially as costly as a film, and after 36 days' worth of shooting Telefilm became uncomfortable and told me the only way we could continue is if I produced a feature film too. In April next year I'll break everything up into little bits and upload them into the Seances interactive, but meanwhile we figured out a way of fitting together all the pieces in a way that made some sense to me.

It might not make immediate sense to viewers though, who may feel they're being presented with a welter, or being tossed into a storm of narrative after two hours of which they're washed up on a shore having barely survived drowning, but that's how it came about. There was a practical, bureaucratic ordaining of the feature. I think it might be the only case in peacetime where a film has been ordered into existence by the government.

Did being forced to make the film help or hinder the creative process?

I loved it. The directors of westerns – which only have about five moving parts – would often say that the restrictions were very liberating, and it's true. When you're faced with too much choice it's paralysing, but it's strangely freeing to have restrictions. And I had extreme restrictions: I had to take the footage I'd already shot and figure out a way for it to make one film. Luckily they were all written and directed by the same people with the same temperament, the same world view, the same sense of masculinity and gender politics.

No matter the genre of the lost film or the actors, the passive or active tenor of each one, each film seemed to be about the same things. Even though there was something like forty different protagonists they are also maybe playing the same man: gripped by the male gaze but a little vaginaphobic, trying to navigate through a fearsome world with bulging eyeballs.

I don't know. I'm not going to analyse my own film, it's just the way I felt while making it. In the writers' room we gave free rein to our dreams, our fears, our autobiographical humiliations. So it was a simple matter of fitting thematic parts together so that the 17 fragments of lost movies, even if they are disparate, all seem to point in the same direction.

What was appealing about resurrecting lost films? Is there something interesting about early cinema or were you attracted to the idea of a film being lost?

At first I told myself I was haunted, that the complete works of Murnau and Hitchcock and Lang weren't available and I was haunted by the missing pieces. I've always been intrigued to try to figure out time's great flow through the twentieth century by the changing context of pop culture, film especially. However, I discovered that what really excited me was that there was a mother lode of fascinating narrative free for the taking. No-one else wanted it. No-one else was interested. I could have it, so I took it. I think it was greed mostly.

As a matter of fact when some lost films have been discovered I've actually felt disappointed, even angered in one case. In Paris I was going to shoot Hello Pop!, a lost Technicolor Three Stooges movie. I was really excited about shooting an all-female version with Elina Löwensohn as Moe and the film was discovered a couple of days before we shot. I was ghoulishly disappointed, so you could hardly say I'm haunted by the loss of cinema if I'm pissed off when some of it gets found. I came to recognise that it was some sort of mania, like a dream in which you find a pound note on the ground and then discover another and another and the next thing you know you've got all this free money. I felt like I was fiending for narrative, and I had this all to myself. I didn't want anyone else to have it.

As I watched The Forbidden Room I felt like it could go on indefinitely – I don't mean that as a criticism – rather it's the result of its structure, the way it goes deeper and deeper within itself. How did you construct the film and how did you find your way back out again?

The structure is one of the things I love about the film but it's also a problem. It's got three acts and there's a story within a story within a story: you go six stories deep in the first act, work your way down to the very centre and then back out again, then in act two you work your way down through nine narratives and back out again, and then in the third penetrating thrust you work your way down through another nine and pull out and climax. I may have gone too far this time. The trouble is I'm still introducing whole new stories with fifteen minutes to go! It gives the viewer no conventional indication of ending any time soon. I hope in the future people feel free to dip in and watch for a while here and there.

Had I known from the beginning that it was going to be a feature film that probably would have affected the writing so that we could have given an indication. But you're right, it could have gone on forever. We shot so much footage that I could have easily made another five or six feature films.

The Forbidden Room is in a fixed state but Seances will create bespoke randomised short films that destroy themselves after viewing. Why create art deliberately to be lost? Cinema isn't an ephemeral medium – do you like the idea of making it so?

I think there's a growing, possibly falsely confident sense that everything will last forever now and everything will be kept. I wanted to reintroduce a sense of loss into cinema, and if someone watches one of these things and the programme in the randomness of matters produces something really enjoyable, it would create a sense of pleasure as that person watches the film slip off into oblivion. It might be giving something to the internet that it's been missing. The missing has been missing! We'll see. It's just a big experiment. I feel for the first time in my life that I am experimenting. There are so many variables in this thing. No mathematician would take it on. I like the fact that there are so many ball bearings rolling around on the floor that no-one knows what they're going to get.

Does that feeling of experimentation come because of the interaction of two different mediums?

Yes, because it's both. The project has one foot planted firmly in the analogue realm, in a big roiling puddle of film emulsion – I picture that foot in a rubber boot – and then the other foot is in the digital realm. It's the 21^st century and Internetty but it's also ghosts, it's ectoplasmic goo, and it's definitely made out of emulsion. I just like something that's exactly both.

You mentioned autobiographical elements arising when writing. If you're recreating lost films and then randomly altering them, do they still remain personal?

I'm the medium through which these things come. Evan Johnson too, the co-writer and co-director. We're the medium so it comes out in our voices and inevitably autobiographical details get stuck on the ectoplasmic flypaper. They come out in the scripts and in the direction and even in the gestures of the actors, although I didn't really direct the actors – I just put them in a trance and slapped them on the ass and let 'em go for a day. I was acting as a spirit photographer.

The Forbidden Room is out now.

Today marks the release of Colin Rothbart’s fly-on-the-wall documentary of London’s East London drag scene: Dressed as a Girl. In its depiction of the dizzying highs and devastating lows encountered along the way to cult superstardom, the film is unflinchingly honest, capturing a world where Queens fight to pretend “everything is fabulous… and no one is ill” while battling an array of personal and collective demons.

Having been at the forefront of the Shoreditch scene for over twenty years, Jonny Wooacts both as the film’s narrator and a primary subject. We sat down with him ahead of the frockumentary’s release to talk about drag, debauchery and the families we choose. Spoiler: it turns out they’re just as dysfunctional as the ones we’re born into.

Six years’ worth of footage was condensed into just two hours, and the narrative jumps very quickly from hilarity to heartache. How was it for you to watch yourself developing on-screen in such a measurable and visceral way?

For all of us there’s a great deal of revelation, especially with the benefit of hindsight. What’s great about the film is that it’s real; people aren’t trying to act up or be relentlessly positive for the camera. It’s not a sycophantic representation of drag that tries to falsely portray us as one big happy family. Thereis a real sense of camaraderie and community running throughout the scene, but the people within it exist as complex beings. Their relationships change and ebb and flow. There’s ambition, there’s disappointment, there’s friendship, and there are strains on those friendships. It’s messy.

It made for pretty difficult viewing at times.

Some parts are uncomfortable to watch. I felt like I was on trial at the premiere, up to be judged by a hundred people. Ultimately the film only presents a snapshot of each of our personalities, and we knew what was coming when we granted Colin access to our lives. We accept that as his subjects. The presentation is fair but it’s not wholly rounded. Certain segments make me wince, but when you look back on life as a whole it can all be a bit cringe-worthy. Audiences have appreciated that honesty so far.

Despite the conflict you’ve mentioned, there was a real sense of solidarity, and it was touching to see you all raising funds for Amber to have gender re-assignment surgery. On film we see some members of the public scoff at the validity of the cause, but it was such a transformative and redemptive experience for her.

Exactly. On screen it’s all dressed up as bit of outrageous fun, which it was, but these are real fundraisers with the power to affect real lives. Of course there are more pressing issues in the world, but if we want to raise money to help out a friend in need then that’s absolutely our business.

Dressed as a Girl goes beyond the humour and superficiality featured in glamorous mainstream shows like Ru-Paul’s Drag Race. Do you think it serves up an alternative version of the art form?

We all enjoy the liberation of dressing up, but we don’t all have this big, instantaneous personality change the moment the drag goes on, which you sometimes see in more mainstream drag. What characterises our drag is that you see the person underneath. The make-up and hair goes on and it generally falls off before the night is over, leaving you half made-up and half undone. You’re exposed, and the real person and the artifice are all kind of mixed together.

The film frequently references personal tragedy and substance abuse: Scottee reveals that his mother once stopped to pick up whisky while driving him to hospital in the middle of an asthma attack, and you discuss your own battles with alcohol. How has your life changed since sobriety?

It’s a miracle that I managed to do what I did for so long. I used to come home on a Monday morning and hibernate until Thursday. I was absolutely living for the weekend, I didn’t know how to stop, and I eventually suffered multiple organ failure. I don’t drink or do drugs any more and I have so much more time to keep up with my career and the business.

What’s next for you?

I have a few ongoing projects. As well as co-managing The Glory, I’m doing a rock-theatre show based around Lou Reed’s Transformeralbum and I have my East London Lecture which, to put simply, explores gentrification in the area.

As someone who has lived in East London for twenty years, are you nostalgic about the way things used to be?

I have this big hang-up with what I think is the overuse of the word 'gentrification’. I remember sitting in Geography class when I was fourteen learning about how it was just a natural evolution that occurred within urban settings, and change is certainly synonymous with the area. I don’t think East London has lost its sense of individualism or its sense of community. You only have to walk through London Fields or Victoria Park to see the an entire cross-section of the city enjoying the same beautiful facilities. The parks here really are the most fantastic things. They’re melting pots. I am proud to be a Londoner, and even prouder to be giving back through the business.

Dressed as a Girl is out in cinemas now, and released on DVD and On-Demand on the 7th of December from Peccadillo Pictures. 

If you love sumptuous 60s European cinema and winning things then we have a competition for you!

Adapted from a short story by David Constantine, Andrew Haigh's new film 45 Years is about a complacently happy married couple, Kate (Charlotte Rampling) and Geoff (Tom Courtenay), whose lives are thrown into disarray when the long-lost body of Geoff's first love is discovered in the Swiss Alps, frozen and unchanged after decades in a glacier.

A beautifully told, quietly moving two-hander about an unexpected marital crisis, 45 Years features wonderful, lived-in performances from its leads, and further confirms Andrew as one of Britain's most talented film-makers. Ahead of its release in cinemas and on demand from 28^th August, the writer-director has put together an exclusive playlist of songs for Oh Comely, inspired by and included in the film.

Given that 45 Years doesn't feature a score, its sound design and use of music is crucial. Andrew told us about his process of selecting music: “Most of the music choices were in the script. I was trying to have songs that reflected the past and parts of their character.” He mentions a key song from the film, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by The Platters, which Kate and Geoff had played at their wedding. “I love their choice for their first dance, because really when you listen it's unclear whether it's a happy song or a really melancholy one. I've heard it being played at wedding parties before and thought, wow, I'm not sure if that's super romantic.” Andrew relates this idea to another song the couple like in the film, Go Now by The Moody Blues: “It has the perception of being romantic but then when you listen to the lyrics you think, 'my god, really?' I find that juxtaposition in music really interesting: that something might have the sense of being a romantic song but the truth behind the lyrics mean something different.”

45 Years: A Playlist Curated by Director Andrew Haigh (available on Spotify) 

I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire - The Ink Spots
Remember (Walking in the Sand) - The Shangri-Las
Suzanne - Leonard Cohen
The Old Man's Back Again - Scott Walker
Stagger Lee - Lloyd Price
I Only Want to Be With You - Dusty Springfield
Tell It Like It Is - Aaron Neville
Happy Together - The Turtles
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes - The Platters
Go Now - The Moody Blues

45 Years is released in UK cinemas and through Curzon Home Cinema on 28^th August. You can listen to the exclusive playlist here.

Photos: Agatha A. Nitecka.