The Television Workshop – once home to the likes of Vicky McClure and Jack O'Connell – shone a spotlight on their next generation with a short film festival centred around the seven deadly sins. We stopped by Broadway Cinema to check it out...
The esteemed TV Workshop has held its first ever short film festival at Broadway to showcase the work of young, upcoming talent on the big screen.
The festival, which the Workshop hopes will become an annual tradition, featured eighty different performances across five shorts based on the overarching theme of sin.
Legendary Nottingham director Shane Meadows came along to the event and was “severely impressed” by the films on show.
“Actors are struggling because very few people will give them a chance unless they see them in something – so to create your own work is such a clever idea,” he told us.
“Up to two-thirds of the cast of Twenty Four Seven, my first feature, came from the Workshop – and from the next generation, I met Vicky McClure and Andrew Shim for Romeo Brass. I had to come back, because there's obviously still an enormous amount of talent here.”
“No two people looked or felt the same,” he added. “It’s a really broad range of talent and I’ve logged a load of faces for the future.”
In addition, actor James Hooton, who starred in Twenty Four Seven and is best known for playing Sam Dingle in Emmerdale, travelled from Yorkshire with his daughter to show their support.
“I came through this group many years ago, so it's great to come and see what the Workshop's doing these days,” he said. “It’s in good shape and people are doing great stuff.”
Suffice to say, we’re in agreement with Shane and James. Find out what we thought of each film below…
Lust
Nightclubs are distinctly weird, depressing, unsettling places, and Lust nails the night out experience to a T. With claustrophobically cramped rooms, relatably grimy toilets and an eclectic mix of young romantics, this one hits home with an unnerving sense of realism, largely due to the authenticity of many cast members’ performances – with douchey lads, clueless partners and gossipy groups colliding for twelve minutes of stress-inducing melodrama.
Pride
Perhaps the outright funniest short of the night, Pride is a hectic yet delightfully truthful deep-dive into the one-of–a-kind world of amateur theatre. Featuring pretentious directors, cringe-inducing warm-up exercises and a stressed-out producer keeping everything together by the skin of her teeth, this is a wonderfully wacky faux one-shot with some genuinely memorable performances. Expect some of this lot to be rocking up in some eclectic BBC comedies in the future.
Wrath
It’s tough to establish the personality of a character in a two-hour feature film, never mind a short – but this ensemble piece manages exactly that. From the moment each actor braces the screen, the audience is familiar with who they are and what they’re going to bring to this tense, tetchy tale of what happens when a group of college kids come together to screw over a frenemy (do the youths still use the term ‘frenemy’?). It’s charmingly chaotic, but in an impressively well-choreographed way.
Greed
Each of the shorts dances between drama and comedy to some extent, but Greed does so the most gracefully. It follows a ragtag group of students who set up a fake charity fundraiser for profit – and while there’s no context as to why anyone is participating in the scam, the unique temperaments of the diverse cast establish them all as distinct characters. It’d make a brilliant feature film or TV miniseries, and ends with a suitably cunning twist.
Envy
Envy achieves the tricky feat of telling a slow-burn narrative in short film format, drip-feeding the audience details of a house party gone terribly wrong. It’s the most overtly dramatic of the bunch, snapping between front-facing police interviews and the drunken haze of the night before. Like each of the films before it, it’s innately character-driven and features some very promising performances.
We have a favour to ask
LeftLion is Nottingham’s meeting point for information about what’s going on in our city, from the established organisations to the grassroots. We want to keep what we do free to all to access, but increasingly we are relying on revenue from our readers to continue. Can you spare a few quid each month to support us?
