DIARY


Today Rain


Edited by Sarah Cooper sarah.cooper@screendaily.com Mean streets


BYSARAHCOOPER Ben Drew (aka UK rapper/soul singer Plan B) is in town for the market premiere of his debut fea- ture iLL Manors, which came out of Film London’s low-budget scheme Microwave and is being sold by Bankside (Revolver releases in the UK next month). The hard-hitting tale of drugs, prostitutes and disaf- fected youth in east London stars UK actors Riz Ahmed and Natalie Press and is narrated by Drew in the form of a rap. With some pretty gruesome


scenes involving the treatment of women, Drew is aware some peo-


Wright arrives


BYSARAHCOOPER Bonnie Wright — better known to most of us as Ginny Weasley from the Harry Potter films — is in Cannes with her first short, Sepa- rate We Come, Separate We Go, selected for the festival’s Short Film Corner. Set in Dungeness in the UK, where her family have a house, the beautifully shot film tells the unlikely relationship of a little girl (who looks like a mini Ginny) and a lonely widower (played by David Thewlis, thanks to their Harry Potter connection). The film shot for a tiny $7,700, which came from the team — made up of her film-school class- mates — and from sponsorship by a local fish-and-chip shop. Meanwhile, Wright has no plans


to give up acting, and she’s clearly not short of offers. During our interview, a film exec type thrust a business card into her hand and offered her the lead in a sci-fi film he is producing. But it sounds as if she already has her hands full, star- ring in two new features, a US indie called Shakespeare’s Daughter and a UK film, set in the late 1700s, In Want Of A Wife. “All of us had our 10 years on


Harry Potter, it was an incredible experience, but I’m now very excited about the next chapter.”


Palme d’Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul was at a breakfast hosted by Mubi and Lomography to launch his new short film Ashes (pictured, above right) which he shot on the new Lomokino Super 35 analogue camera. The Thai director had seen the camera online and loved the look of it, so when he was approached by Mubi to make a short, he jumped at the chance. “I am always interested in new ways of producing images. With digital, you know what you’re going to get. This camera won’t give you the perfect image but it has its own character. It is special.” The director of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives told Screen that


Separate We Come, Separate We Go


as well as using his Lomokino camera to document his dog growing up, he is also writing a new feature, which he describes as a “brutal comedy”. His documentary Mekong Hotel is showing here in Cannes as a Special Screening.


n 12 Screen International at Cannes May 21, 2012 MeAnd Me Dad Ben Drew


ple might see the film as misogy- nistic. “I think it’s the opposite. I’m trying to say, men are bastards and that’s how they treat women in that environment. So if it comes across as misogynistic, in reality it is, in that world. But anyone who


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Tomorrow Cloudy


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thinks it’s cool to treat women like that is a c***.” The film may be bleak but there


are moments of humour, albeit very dark humour. “In real life, bad things happen,” says Drew, who drew on some of his own experiences growing up for the feature. “We cry, but we also laugh. It was about getting natural humour and a lot of that came from letting the actors improvise.” Not content with acting (he will


next be seen in The Sweeney oppo- site Ray Winstone), directing and singing, the multi-talented Lon- doner revealed he is to launch his own fashion label as well as a music publishing company to sup- port up-and-coming young artists.


Kelly Brook, Sarah Cooper, Keith Lemon


Meet the debutants KATRINE BOORMAN, ME AND ME DAD


Katrine Boorman


Me And Me Dad, Katrine Boorman’s documentary about her film-maker father John Boorman, screens in Cannes Classics today. High Point is handling sales on the film which is likely to surface in the UK next spring to coincide with a John Boorman retrospective at the BFI.


Getting the juice from Lemon


It was a case of one extreme to the other as I went from interviewing the very serious Ben Drew to the not serious at all Keith Lemon of TV show Celebrity Juice (played by comedian Leigh Francis) and UK actress/model Kelly Brook, who are here to launch Keith Lemon: The Movie, being released by Lion- sgate in the UK on August 24. The film, says Keith, is a “rags to riches story based on truth, apart


from 98% of it which has been made up for entertainment pur- poses”, with appearances from a host of celebs including Gary Bar- low, as well as lots of scenes involv- ing Brooks’ boobs by the sounds of it. “He touches them a lot in the movie,” says the actress, laughing. With a TV crew shooting our chat for a documentary about the film, it was one of the more bizarre interviews I’ve done here.


What inspired you to make the film? I just had this feeling that it would be wonderful to get a masterclass in film-making from my father. I’ve never been behind the camera. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to step into his world.” In some ways, it was an excuse to be with him. He had just separated from his second wife and it was a great opportunity. When you’re one of four children, you are always vying for the father’s attention, the mother’s attention.


What does he think of the film? He saw it and he said, “I think you’ve made quite a good film apart from the old man in it.” It’s difficult to have to watch yourself, to have to watch all your own family. It’s very difficult to make a film about your father and your own family in the sense that it’s hard to have an objective eye. I was quite lucky to have a wonderful


producer Mel Agace, a husband — Danny Moynihan — who also produces, and Rose Garnett, who is usually a story editor on film and came in at the end.


You shot the film over a considerable period of time… I’ve been making this film — it does sound a long time — for about five years. My father is in Ireland. In the interim, my husband and I made a feature film called Boogie Woogie. We’ve got two kids. We do a thousand-and-one other things.


Was it easy to edit? My father kept saying, “Why the hell can’t you cut this film together?” It occurred to me that I had become quite addicted to our rendezvous. I covered lots of festivals and all kinds of footage that didn’t make it into the cut. It became what it became. I had a lot of star interviews. I chopped it all away.


What does the film mean to you? For me, it was an intimate piece. It was driven by the family, either in agreement or opposition to what he was saying. It’s a daughter’s point of view as to what those films meant in terms of reflecting family and family stories. Geoffrey Macnab


Joe Conway


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