Heavy Load premieres at South by Southwest
Heavy Load Review in the Austin Chronicle
Deep Water wins Best Documentary from the San Diego Film Critics Society
Deep Water wins Best Cinema Documentary at the Griersons
The Observer: British actor stars as Salvador Dali in controversial film account of his affair with the doomed poet Lorca
Screen Daily: The Works takes on sales for Oudney's romantic comedy French Film
Screen Daily: French Film starts shooting in London
Screen Daily: Paul Morrison kicks off shoot for UK-Spain project Little Ashes
Heavy Load Review in the Austin Chronicle
Heavy Load premiered at the South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas earlier this month and it went down a storm! To see an interview with Heavy Load Director Jerry Rothwell and band member Paul, click here Below you can read an extract of an article from the Austin Chronicle reviewing Heavy Load: MARCH 7th 2008 BY JOSH ROSENBLATT
Music on the margins
Extract
"Which is similar to what the members of British punk band Heavy Load do, but in their case, the upheaval and cry for equality is fortified by the weight of actual political will. When director Jerry Rothwell first began filming the band a few years ago, they were little more than a curiosity, a group out of Brighton that, like dozens of other bands in England, specialized in high-octane, barking punk rock songs but that, quite unlike those other bands, comprised mainly learning-disabled members.
Relying on an abundance of heart and enthusiasm, "the U.K.'s Only Disabled Punk Band" was making a small name for itself as a live group in Brighton when Rothwell first heard about them. But the director, who had recently descended into depression after the failure of an earlier film project, saw the band as something more: a group that existed outside the mainstream commercial music world and that, in the true punk spirit, was making music "for fun, not fame" and happily destroying expectations in the process. He saw them as a pure good in an impure world. So, as much for his own mental health as anything else, Rothwell took a chance and decided to document the band's world.
His bet paid off. The story he captures in Heavy Load is a minor miracle, really, at once a classic rockumentary about a band and its creative and personal differences, an eye-opening look at the artistic and (more fascinating still) psychological/emotional lives of the mentally challenged, and a story about a group of people who go from part-time musicians to full-fledged social activists in the name of punk rock. Taking as inspiration one of their own songs, "Stay Up Late," the band starts a movement to free state-supported disabled adults from the confines of their curfew system so that they can choose the kinds of lives they want to be living. Like true punks, the members of Heavy Load challenge the status quo loudly on behalf of those who can't speak for themselves (a scene in which the boys terrorize businesswomen at a music-publishing house with their amped-up version of Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You out of My Head" is easily one of the joys of my movie-watching year thus far) and in the process turn their hobby into a national movement of discontent, disaffection, and possibility.
Halfway through Heavy Load, Rothwell talks about the act of artistic creation as a "land of possibility," the place where we imagine the people we might become. I'd go one step further and argue that art is, at its best, the creation of new worlds through the manipulation of the world that's been granted to us; it's the belief that reality is merely a collection of raw material waiting to be reassembled. Take, for example, the musicians in Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet, who take apart old Nintendo Game Boy systems and turn them into musical instruments. By hijacking and reshaping corporate technology and using it in ways its inventors never thought of, these "blip" musicians are able to take control of their own experiences, in this case taking relics of their past - instruments of nostalgia - and converting them into a means to creating the future.
In its way, that kind of active realignment, this refusal to accept "expert" authority, is an act of revolution as old as art itself (and definitely as old as rock & roll). It's also the most effective and the most subversive way for artists to create the vocabulary that will allow them to reconfigure a world that's trying, at every turn, to crush them under the rubble of history, be it social, political, or personal.
In the 21st century, first you seize the means of production; then you rewire them."
Screen International
Wondrous Oblivion: "A poignant, warm-spirited coming-of-age drama ... understated but effective in the points it makes, Wondrous Oblivion steers clear of the melodramatic and refuses to indulge in the kind of overt audience manipulation that would have made for a more conventional and less appealing film .... Less is more appears to have been the general guiding principle for a modest, memorable film that effortlessly touches the heart."
