Creative England has named the final two films to be greenlit through its iFeatures2 low budget filmmaking initiative.
Spaceship from writer/director Alex Taylor and The Goob from writer/director Guy Myhill join Martin Radich’s Norfolk, which was greenlit in February.
All three films will be made later this year, each with a budget of £350,000 ($545,000).
The projects were chosen through a competitive process, which drew almost 400 submissions. These were whittled down to 16, then eight and finally - following a nine-month development process - the final three projects.
Creative England has partnered with BBC Films, BFI Film Fund and Creative Skillset on the low-budget development, production and training initiative.
iFeatures2 is a national version of the original iFeatures, which saw three films set and made in Bristol, including the recently released Flying Blind directed by Katarzyna Klimkiewicz produced by Alison Sterling and starring Helen McCrory.
Tristan Goligher, iFeatures executive producer, said all three films “provide a cinematic and curious discourse on what it means to live in England today”.
Guy Myhill’s The Goob is described as “an emotionally charged tale of divided family loyalties played out over a sizzling hot summer, in Fenland, England”.
Myhill has produced and directed film and visuals for Hoi Polloi Theatre Company leading to two Edinburgh Festival Gold awards, a long-term residency at the Barbican and tours across the USA, Australia and Japan.
His producers include Lee Groombridge and Mike Elliot.
Groombridge worked on The Chemical Brother’s Don’t Think and was awarded music video producer of the year at the 2012 UK Music Video Awards. Elliott has worked on 40 features with directors including Michael Winterbottom, Lars Von Trier, Woody Allen, Jane Campion, Pawel Pawlikowski, Edgar Wright, Matthew Vaughan and Lynne Ramsay.
Alex Taylor’s Spaceship tells the story of a small town hinterland where teenagers search for themselves in a space between fantasy and reality.
Taylor’s first short, Kids Might Fly, won international awards such as the Special Jury Prize at SXSW. Producer is Nicola Bowen.
In Martin Radich’s Norfolk, a man’s unspeakable past starts to catch up with him, and he is finally forced to confront what is right and what is wrong in order to protect his family’s future.
It marks Radich’s second feature after Crack Willow in 2008. The new film will team him with producer Finlay Pretsell (Ma Bar) and Rachel Dargavel.
Creative England will take Groombridge, Elliot and Bowen to Cannes this month to meet international producers.
The executive producers for all three films are Creative England head of talent Christopher Moll, Steve Jenkins (BBC Films), Chris Collins (BFI Film Fund) and Tristan Goligher (iFeatures).
Full synopses
The Goob
We’re in the middle of a heat-wave in Fenland England. Goob Taylor has spent each of his sixteen summers helping Mum run the transport cafe and harvest the surrounding beet fields. When Mum shacks up with swarthy stock-car supremo and ladies’ man Gene Womack, Goob becomes an unwelcome side thought. However Goob’s world turns when exotic beet picker Eva arrives. Fuelled by her flirtatious comments, Goob dreams of better things.
Spaceship
When his daughter goes missing in an apparent alien abduction, Gabriel’s search takes him dangerously close to her strange group of so-called friends. But the further he goes inside their computer game and fantasy-obsessed world, the more he realises that he must confront his own difficult memories to get his daughter back.
A father and son live a reclusive lifestyle in the middle of nowhere. The man, a disillusioned mercenary, has his final target in sight - a gang of foreign revolutionaries who lay low in a nearby derelict compound. As the man closes in on his target the boy falls for the revolutionaries’ serving girl. Having spent his whole life in isolation the boy now discovers the warmth of friendship and the pleasures of something more. As father and son collide the boy is sent running, running in pain and full of betrayal, straight into the twisted embittered arms of his maternal grandparents, who have come to snatch and save him. Figuring out what is right and wrong, what is good and bad is a task for both the man and the audience.
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