Brief Encounters: The Joy of Six

Anyone who’s recently ventured to a short film festival worth its salt will know that some of the most daring cinema being made in the UK right now barely lasts the time it takes to hard boil an egg. The question is, where to see these shorts? After their tour of festivals they might find their way online, but how can they compete when they're up against videos of sneezing kittens?

New British Cinema Quarterly has a nifty solution. It's packaged six shorts into one feature-length programme, which is being screened to audiences across the UK. “I think it's great that someone can come to the cinema and spend the time in which they would normally see one film watching six distinct narratives, genres and visions,” says Dan Sully, the director of The Ellington Kid, one of the films in the collection, cheekily titled The Joy of Six.

Will Jewell, director of Man in Fear, another in The Joy of Six’s sestet, is equally enthusiastic about the venture, but admits to some initial trepidation. “If your short is screened at a festival in the company of films that are completely different I think it can often harm it,” Jewell tells me, “so when I actually saw all six of them together for the first time the other week I was definitely relieved – there’s diversity there but they really complement each other.”

The Ellington Kid, which sees a mouthy London lad (Charlie G. Hawkins) relaying news of a neighbourhood stabbing to his credulous pal (Hammed Animashaun) over a kebab, begins with the intriguing disclaimer: based on a true story...(kind of). “I was making a music video for an artist who lived on what they used to call 'Murder Mile' – the Lower Clapton Road in Hackney,” Sully recalls. “I remember him telling me this story as if it was a true story that happened to a friend of his. That's where the 'true story' bit comes from. The 'kind of' bit comes from the fact that, in retrospect, it's an obvious urban myth. I guess I thought it was funny to start with boards that weren't even sure whether it was a true story or not, and also it's a small nod to the beginning of Fargo.”

Jewell’s film also feels like a slice of urban folklore. Playing off the disparate energies of a jittery journalist (Luke Treadaway), who’s investigating a performance artist whom he also suspects of being a serial killer, and the no-nonsense copper (Timothy Healy) he comes to for help, it blends a Hitchcockian man in peril tale with a Final Destination-like sense of impending doom. “I made a documentary about the underground hip-hop scene in Brighton and I spent a lot of time filming graffiti artists and train painters,” Jewell explains when I ask about his film’s juicy premise. “It kind of got me thinking: they’re out risking court injunctions and getting killed by trains to make their art, and that seed made me think of the lengths people go to to create art. I’d also written a script a few years earlier that had a character in it who was a hitman who made his hits look like accidents and there was a light bulb moment when the two slammed together.”

Both films share a noirish vision of Blighty, but differ in their forms. Sully’s effort is the perfect short; fat-free at only four minutes, it could only exist in this genre. “At first I was slightly disappointed and worried that people might think the film slight or insubstantial but the truth is that most people I show it to really like the short length. The content fits the form in this case. It's a punchline film really so it's all about the set up and then the delivery of that punchline. Anything more than four minutes would have been indulgent I think.”

Man in Fear, meanwhile, is crying out to be expanded upon. “I wrote the feature script first,” Jewell tells me, “but trying to get it off the ground was tricky. When I got the opportunity to make a short I thought, ‘Right, I’m not going to make any old short, I’m going to make a window into the world of the picture to help get it off the ground.’ ”

So can we expect a Man in Fear feature anytime soon?

“We're basically out looking for funding for a feature now,” says Jewell. “The challenge, if we ever got to do the feature, is to keep the same cast, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”