Film4.0's Scene Stealers winners led by The Brothers Lynch, Luke Aherne

Film4’s new digital arm, Film4.0 has awarded the first prize in its new Scene Stealers competition to The Brothers Lynch (Keith and David Lynch) for their ‘steal’ of a scene from Shane Meadows’ This Is England. Their winning entry [pictured], which reimagines Combo’s speech as a right wing politician’s oratory, can be viewed here.

The international talent search programme gives the pair a £5,000 development grant and mentoring from Film4.0 to develop an original short film project. The winning film will be shown on Film4 as well as at the UK premiere of Lawless at Film4 Summer Screen at Somerset House.

Entrants were asked to reimagine scenes from past Film4 productions in two minutes or under. The competition received almost 500 entries.

Of the Brothers Lynch’s entry, the judges said: “Meadows writes dialogue rooted in character, culture and situation – his characters are not mere mouthpieces for clunky speechifying – but it’s impressive how the filmmakers here have taken a piece of rhetoric by Steven Graham’s Combo, and made it work as a plausible piece of xenophobic oratory by a right-wing politician. But maybe this is a comment on all political discourse: how much is success about vision and leadership, and how much is it about repackaging the electorate’s fundamental prejudices? And there’s a lot more going on than that in this film. This is an ambitious, multi-layered work that is also impressively highly achieved.”

The winners noted: “We both love This Is England and especially Stephen Graham’s performance in the film so we wanted to take the scene in a very different direction whilst also retaining the essence of it. A right wing politicians speech really seemed to make sense to us and our high concept sensibilities inspired us to take it in the direction we did.”

For the international winner, the jury honoured Luke Aherne’s Trainspotting 2018 (view here) which reworked the Choose Life speech in a future society.

A special jury prize went to Ross Johnston’s entry based on Dead Man’s Shoes (seen here).

Special mentions went to Stefan Davis’ Attack the Block 2: War of Shadows, Simon Glass’s Dogspotting, Darryll McGowan’s Dead Man’s Shoes: A Tale of Revenge, Andromeda Godfrey’s A Stolen Scene of Elizabethan Proportions and Simon Jago’s Attack the Block – Movie Maniacs.

The jury included filmmakers Asif Kapadia, Lone Scherfig and Joe Cornish, journalist Charles Gant, Film4 Channel Editor David Cox and Film4.0 commissiong executive Anna Higgs.

Higgs said: “I was hoping that we’d find some gems by looking for talent in this brand new way for Film4, but I’ve been totally bowled over by the incredible response and the standard of entries to Scene Stealers.  The flair, invention and creativity that poured in from every corner of the UK and around the world has been simply amazing, and is a real testament to the strength and diversity of grass-roots filmmaking.  Huge congratulations to our winners, I can’t wait to work with them – and I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more from all our filmmakers in the future.”