Shed Your Tears and Walk Away

Picturesque Hebden Bridge has long been a magnet for tourists and commuters looking for a rural paradise, but for a significant portion of its residents it is purgatory. First-time director Jez Lewis, who was born and raised in Hebden, is disturbed to realise that increasingly he only returns to attend the funerals of friends who have succumbed to the plague of drink, drugs and suicide that seems to have overtaken the town.

He takes his camera to try to find out why this is so and quickly falls into an easy – if sometimes chiding and despairing – intimacy with his old contemporaries as they engage in Hebden's version of the al fresco lifestyle – getting wrecked in the park. Filmed over the following 18 months while the deaths continued to mount up, Shed Your Tears is a deeply sympathetic portrait of lives that would normally only be brought to the screen to be pathologised. A humane, engaged and compelling documentary. [Keir Roper-Caldbeck]