A note on : Limbo at Cannes Court Metrage, Manlleu Film Fest, Dokufest Kosovo

A few years back I co-wrote a short film called, LIMBO, originated and filmed by Lotje Sodderland. Thanks to Lotje and the films producers, it has been doing festival rounds recently, after being screened the London Short film fest it has upcoming screenings at Cannes Film Festival Court Metrage, Manlleu festival in Catalunia and Dokufest in Kosovo.

“LIMBO is a true-fiction short following the story of Witold, a young, Polish Londoner who takes a new job as a care worker. Under-trained and underpaid, he speeds from home to home on his bicycle, feeling the enormity of his responsibility as he enters hidden worlds to administer care to a delicate but dynamic assortment of elderly men living alone.” https://www.lotjesodderland.com/portfolio/l-i-m-b-o

Ken Loach said of it ‘This is a film of compassion and tender observation of lives we rarely see – it’s in the performance of the routine tasks made by one person for another that we start to grapple with meaning, dignity and what it is to be human.’

A note on : Limbo screened at London Short Film Festival

This first screening of Limbo, Lotje Sodderland’s new short film which I co-wrote, was supposed to take place this January 2021 in the Curzon cinema, either in Soho or Mayfair. Unfortunately, not possible, and so the London Short Film Festival premiered it online, in a program of excellent shorts. Nice that the film has been aired once, and hopefully many more festivals to come.

A note on : Limbo, co-writing a film by Lotje Sodderland

A few years ago I worked with the filmmaker Lotje Sodderland on a project about the human brain, amongst other things, and more recently she asked me to co-write a film she was developing. I drafted her idea, added to the script, offered a version of it, altered some narratives and then writing took on new forms, with Lotje’s work and improvised shooting as a mode. A really collaborative process, common to cinema of course.

As is the way with films, it took time to grow, get production underway, edit and alter, finding it’s final shape. This shape is nearly fixed and the result is something really poignant and elegant. The film is called LIMBO and here is what Ken Loach said about it:

‘This is a film of compassion and tender observation of lives we rarely see – it’s in the performance of the routine tasks made by one person for another that we start to grapple with meaning, dignity and what it is to be human.’

Pretty extraordinary, and for me too, as part of the writing team, it’s a great credit. The film should begin to see public eyes in 2021 and more can be found out about it here https://lief.london/portfolio/limbo The portrayal of real elderly men, isolated in London, found actors, is something so powerfully captured and really is painfully relevant given the announcement of a second lockdown here in the UK/

A note on : Writing on the film Limbo, by Lotje Sodderland

A few years ago I was asked by the film-maker Lotje Sodderland, whom I met and worked with many years ago on our A World Without Words project, exploring the brain, neuroaesthetics and aphasia, to write a draft of a short film screenplay for an idea she had about the care of the elderly in London and the kind of people who do that work. I spent a summer toying with the work and learning a lot about the process, submitting lots of drafts, working with the producers and we were even shortlisted for a big BFI scheme. As ever with film, the process has been knotty and lengthy, but Lotje has perservered and the film has been shot and is close to being finished. In these stages some really world renowned filmmakers have been helping Lotje work on the last touches and I’ve spent some of my lockdown time doing rewrites, playing with ideas on the script with Lotje. Having seen snippets of the work, and given the affect of the recent plague on the very people this film celebrates, the isolated elderly in the city, its a powerful piece.