Exodus

Dir: Penny Woolcock UK 2007. 110 mins.
As much community project as feature film, Exodus transplants the Biblical story of Moses and the children of Israel to the depressed British seaside resort of Margate, in a dystopian future where racist politicians hold sway and asylum seekers are fenced inside a refugee ghetto that was once a funfair.

Though there's no denying the sincerity and passion of director Penny Woolcock's call for ethnic and social tolerance, or the therapeutic value of her use of local people from a community riven by racial tension as supporting actors and extras, the end product is as fragile as a reed basket. With the character development and production values of an earnest student musical, Exodus labours its message, and in the end is buoyed up only by the infectious verve and enthusiasm of its neighbourhood cast.

Produced by Artangel - the British art charity whose remit is to bring contemporary art out of galleries and into the real world - and commissioned by Channel 4, the film is likely to be given a limited UK theatrical release this autumn in conjunction with its Channel 4 TV airing. Elsewhere Exodus might just attract a handful of arthouse distributors, but small-screen action looks more likely. Artangel's involvement also extended to commissioning a 25-metre-high standing figure made out of waste materials from British sculptor Anthony Gormley, which was burnt, Wicker Man style, in a ceremony that was both an art happening and a scene in the film.

Margate's morph from elegant Victorian seaside resort to dilapidated holding station for asylum seekers has already been charted in more neo-realist style in Pawel Pawlikowski's The Last Resort. Here the town is imagined split into two halves in a not-too-distant future scenario that carries echoes of Children of Men. On one side of the divide is the Promised Land - actually a fairly ordinary English town, ruled over from his comfortable castle home by Pharaoh Mann (Bernard Hill), a modern Oswald Mosley who has built his political career on racial hatred.

On the other is Dreamland - an army-patrolled shanty town that harbours all of society's undesireables, from illegal immigrants to substance abusers. Set in a disused funfair, Dreamland is built largely out of recycled rubbish - beer crates, colanders, discarded CDs, police barricade tape. It's populated by glue-sniffing urchins with designer-smeared faces, ranting religious freaks, Rasta poets, cute Oriental computer hackers and a hobo bar pianist who sings an inadvertently hilarious dirge that could have been written by Neil Innes for Monty Python.

The clunky allegorical plot hinges on Pharaoah's adopted son, Moses (Daniel Percival), whose birth mother turns out to be a gypsy resident of Dreamland. When he accidentally kills a soldier inside the ghetto, Moses takes refuge there, discovers his mother and blood brother Aaron, and ends up marrying Zipporah (Clare-Hope Ashitey), whose father Jethro is shot dead by Pharaoh's 'pest control' troops. Becoming a guerrilla leader, Moses unleashes various plagues on the Promised Land (one is a computer virus) and turns from naive idealist to hardened terrorist.

There's commitment in the performances, though Percival doesn't quite have the screen presence to pull off the central role. And the heart-on-sleeve earnestness of the whole thing gels occasionally into effective drama. But mostly Exodus is a stilted affair whose let's-make-a-film naivety undermines the power of its message.

Director
Penny Woolcock

Production companies
Artangel (UK)
Channel 4 (UK)

International sales
Artangel (UK)
(44) 207 713 1400

Producer
Ruth Kenley-Letts

Screenplay
Penny Woolcock

Executive producer
Michael Morris

Cinematography
Jakob Ihre

Production design
Christina Moore

Editor
Brand Thumim

Music
Malcolm Lindsay

Main cast
Bernard Hill
Daniel Percival
Ger Ryan
Clare Hope-Ashitey
Anthony Johnson
Delroy Moore