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Buy tickets for Light Years by Esther May Campbell now. Book now for tickets in selected cinemas across the UK! Q&A screenings will be happening in most locations.

LIGHT YEARS Esther May Campbell’s BFI debut feature that I shot with Zac Nicholson is now on tour of UK cinemas. See link for dates near you.

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LIGHT YEARS (working title) - BFI feature

Autumn 2014 I spent approx. five weeks in Bristol with my old friend, housemate and collaborator, director Esther May Campbell, shooting the second block of her first feature. Set in the 'edgelands',a very British no-mans-land where urban sprawl meets the wild margins, the film tells the story of a family coping with the tragic figure of the mother (Beth Orton). Developing the ideas & themes of her BAFTA-winning short September (2009), Esther initially shot for six weeks in the Summer with DOP Zac Nicholson, on 16mm and a full crew. Working on film with child non-actors, and other practical obstacles such as bad weather and multiple locations, Esther realised she was going to struggle to complete, bravely deciding to keep to her own pace and boneyard significant portions of the shoot. She then went into the edit and planned a second block of shooting while producer Samm Haillay (Third Films) raised a micro completion budget. With Zac Nicholson unavailable in the Autumn, Esther rang up, showed me a rough cut and asked if I would complete the film. Aside from wanting to support my old friend, I was very impressed by the material she showed me and happily emptied my diary to move to Bristol for the second block in September. This time round we took a very different approach. Talking to Zac and listening to Esther's pros & cons of the first shooting block, we decided to shoot digitally on a Sony F55 with Angenieux Optimo compact zooms (15-40mm + 28-76mm). I worked on my own with Esther, sound recordist Dave Bekkvold and an absolute minimum of production support on set. There were days I needed crew for lighting but mostly there were 4-5 of us. This opened up a new spontaneous way of working with Esther's three child non-actors, who turned in some extraordinary performances. The father, Mumhammet Uzner (Once Upon A Time In Anatolia), also flew back from Turkey to work with the radically reduced crew. I was careful to continue the visual style of the film - essentially long tracking shots, static wides and slow pans, mixed with free-wheeling handheld work - but the freedom of working on digital with such a small crew enabled Esther & I to react to situations and make changes as we went along. The film has a detached poetic melancholia to it but also a kind of sensual anarchic joy - Tarkovsky meets Gummo!