Abingdonian 2018

48 The Abingdonian Abingdon Film Unit It’s been a bumper year for the Film Unit. Lots of new recruits joined in September and by December there were no fewer than nineteen films in production. Had that number been achieved, it would have been a record - as well as a marathon to sit through - so perhaps it was fortunate that by the time of the annual screening, eleven films had been finished, with a further two tied over to next year. Filmmaking is hard. It requires determination and staying power as well as ideas and creativity. It’s not for everyone. But the achievement of those who stay the course is significant. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “Practising an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow.” By that measure, several AFU filmmakers now have souls in rude health. This year, David Bicarregui, Joe Bradley, Liam Deegan and Fraser Scott all completed their third film, and tackled ever more challenging material in the process. Liam and Fraser tried to make a spoof action film when they joined the Unit, but it took them two years and two documentaries to achieve that goal. Now armed with an understanding of how to tell a story economically, they delivered The Last Slice , the comic tale of a battle for the last piece of pizza. The film went down well, not least with boarders, whose demolition of the interval refreshments suggested they’d identified with the hungry protagonists, played by Harry Buchan and Matthew Buhler. David Bicarregui’s idea came after a bus ride from Abingdon to Oxford and a chance conversation with a fellow traveller. In Transit overcame the technical challenges of recording interviews with passengers on public transport to serve up a delightfully quirky documentary reminding us that beneath our traditional reserve lies a well of human experience and feeling we all too easily fail to register, let alone share. By turns trivial and profound, In Transit felt like the cinematic embodiment of W H Davies’ famous lines: A poor life this, if full of care / We have no time to stand and stare. Joe Bradley turned his camera on someone who’s had to stand and stare for most of her life, but not by choice. Diana Messer lost her hearing at the age of 7 and has felt left out ever since. Joe’s film An Outsider gave Diana, now in her eighties, the chance to look back at her life and share her feelings. Joe showed her viewing old photographs and home movies, peering through windows, standing alone in the snow or trailing behind others on a country walk, each shot conveying her isolation. In the film’s most telling sequence – one entirely without sound - we saw Diana in close up at the dinner table, her eyes scanning the mouths of others as they formed words, smiled, laughed and revelled in the togetherness of a shared experience while Diana tried, and failed, to become part of the group. Hard on the heels of these AFU ‘veterans’ were a clutch of filmmakers tackling the cinematic equivalent of ‘Difficult Second Album Syndrome’. Jake Drew would have achieved his holy trinity of films had it not been for the rogue who stole his laptop in 2017 and deprived him of a year’s work. Undeterred, Jake returned to the subject of his first film – refuse bins – to create a sequel to his popular 2016 piece, The Recycling of Love . Has Bins was the wordless tale of a waste bin’s escape to the country after being rescued from a recycling plant by its ‘parents’ – two larger wheelie bins. In years to come, commentators will no doubt wonder at Jake’s preoccupation