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| From the Producers of Sunset Song |
Case study of independent, low-budget UK film: Sunset Song (director Terence Davies, 2016)
For the second half of the exam, we look at Sunset Song directed by Terence Davies and examine what made it a critical (artistic) success, its casting, the ways in which it shows a different funding model to Hollywood movies and the ways in which its themes are different from the 4S megafranchise model.
It was produced by Iris Productions, SellOut Pictures and Hurricane Films and backed by BFI, Creative Scotland, BBC Scotland and Luxembourg Film Fund.[3]
BFI film review
Sunset Song was a UK/Luxembourg co-production part-financed by Creative Scotland, who awarded £450,000 towards the development of the film.
To capture the beauty of the landscape, and showcase the Scottish locations as characters in their own right, the film-makers chose to shoot on 65mm film, a creative decision aimed at creating depth, clarity and emotional impact on the screen, on an Arri Alexa [a film-style digital camera].
The film received its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) - widely recognised as the most important film festival after Cannes - and screened in competition at the London Film Festival and the San Sebastian Film Festival. It went on general release across the UK in early December 2015, to a string of 4 and 5 star reviews – Mark Kermode called it ‘a lyrical triumph’ – and Agyness Deyn was nominated for Most Promising Newcomer in the British Independent Film Awards 2015.
5 things about Sunset Song:
- Terence Davies as Britain's greatest living auteur: themes are often hardship and poverty of working class lives
- 'Filmic' quality: beauty and brutality: shot on 65mm using an Ari Alexa (film-style digital camera)
- Lyrical rural beauty of countryside (exteriors) contrasted with claustrophobic domestic conflict (indoors). First time Davies has focussed on outdoors: this meant expensive shoots in Scotland and New Zealand
- Literary adaptation from Lewis Grassic Gibbon's trilogy: on the eve of the Great War, a beautiful farmer's daughter endures the hardships of rural Scottish life as she comes of age
- Box office figures: it was a critical / artistic success, loved by 'prestige' audiences. Grossed approx. $160 thousand worldwide (Box Office Mojo)
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