‘a ROLE to PLAY’ screens at the 67 The International Short Film Festival Oberhausen

A film shot in Bolsover by Esther Johnson, Professor of Film and Media Arts, screened on Saturday 8th May at the prestigious International Short Film Festival Oberhausen @kurzfilmoberhausen, Germany, one of the oldest short film festivals in the world. The film is distributed by ARGOS Centre for art and media in Brussels @argos_arts and will screen in a programme of a selection of works from their collection.

a ROLE to PLAY brings together a range of contributors who live in Bolsover, one of the most deprived towns in the middle of England, including workers and volunteers at the Freedom Community Project and Food bank @freedomproj , and former MP Dennis Skinner, to tell their stories of the impact of economic changes brought from post-industrialisation.

The film experiments with methods of co-creation, radical documentary theatre and oral testimony, with project participants storytelling privileged over the questioning/answering scenario of traditional documentary. The title echoes the participatory film process, and also the roles everyone takes in their working and non-working lives.

Made in direct response to the increasing numbers of unemployment and zero-hour contracts across the UK, the film explores the realities and struggles that some residents of Bolsover have encountered in gaining and sustaining employment amidst the town’s post-mining legacy of deindustrialisation.

We hear the lived experiences and dreams of town residents including Dennis Skinner who remembers in terms of starting in parliament, “1970. I got elected, and six o’clock the day after I went to work. I didn’t have two ha’pennies to rub together. I hadn’t got a bank account. I hadn’t got a car. I went to work because I didn’t know when I was going to get paid in Parliament. Nobody sent me a letter saying turn up on such and such a day. I just had to keep looking in the papers to see when swearing in started. So I kept going to the pit.’

The film was made as part of http://workprojects.org.uk with @animateprojectsuk and partnering with @junctionartsuk @vividprojectsuk @derbyquad + @fermynwoods. The film was also featured in celebration of May Day in a special screening in partnership with #NewhamTradesCouncil www.newhamtradescouncil.org on 1 May.

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