an intermission

In late 2019 I was awarded the Guardian/Joseph Rowntree Foundation Award at Sheffield Doc/Fest, and subsequently the BFI/DocSociety’s Made Of Truth Award. Over the next year I used the awards to continue a long-term project I had begun working on in a self-initiated capacity in 2018.

Since summer 2018 I’d been spending time with a group of young people (14-21) in Stoke on Trent, UK, who are either homeless or who have recently experienced it.

At the centre of the project is an artists’ film made in collaboration with that shifting group of young participants. The intention was to make a work that spoke to an audience who are not familiar with their way of life, and for the group to feel represented on screen in a genuine way.

I taught members of the group how to use high-end film equipment, which we often operated together. Alongside this I led informal workshops in photography and creative writing, and participants documented their own lives using 35mm photography and disposable cameras, showing what they’d done to the rest of the group each week. We watched films about homelessness and precarity, and talked about the way people in their situation are represented. Participants led a small tour of places that had meaning for them around the city, curated a public exhibition in a city centre art gallery, and wrote bits of text to those in the outside world who haven’t experienced the things that they have.

The overwhelming feeling I had from the young people who took part was a desire to be seen as human beings - people who laugh, cry, are angry and happy, and who have unique experiences and something to say. I tried to make a piece of work which did some justice to that.

The film’s collaboratively-made soundtrack, Intermission Music, is being released as an limited artists’ edition run of 500 vinyl records with all profits going to young people who’ve experienced homelessness.

Funded and supported by: The Guardian, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Orwell Foundation, DocSociety, British Film Institute

Selected: Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2020, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) 2020, London Short Film Festival 2020, Aesthetica Art Prize 2020, Aesthetica Future Now Symposium 2020, Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival 2021, Bolton International Film Festival 2021, Aesthetica Short Film Festival 2021, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) 2021

Awarded: International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) 2020 Best Children’s Documentary - Jury Special Mention; Aesthetica Art Prize 2021 (longlist)