Short films at Festival Central (4) - Man in Fear (2011)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

2 December

* Contains spoilers *

Director / writer : Will Jewell

This film gives a delightful interchange between a constable manning a desk in the station (Tim Healy, credited by IMDb as Sargent (sic) Brown, though he does not, as I recollect, have a Sergeant’s stripes) and the film’s protagonist Anthony Fox (Luke Treadaway), which, whilst not literally at the centre of Man in Fear, at least gives us an insight into what Fox fears.

Not in a derivative way, I was reminded of a scene in Luc Besson’s Angel-A (2005), where a similar desperation leads André Moussah (Jamel Debbouze) to seek arrest in the cells as sanctuary (equally, there’s Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life), but Healy’s PC was delightfully erudite, delightfully abrupt, and simply, in a superbly bluff British way, not willing to entertain what he was being told or what was done. (Not until afterwards, anyway.)

Beforehand, Treadaway brought us all the early fluster from North by Northwest (1959) of trying to prove the reality of what is happening to him, only to find that no one wants to listen, of being confronted by this PC who throws Damien Hirst and his suspended sharks in his face. In between, is the audience, to whom Fox's paranoia is palpable, and in whose hands - almost - his character’s fate seems to lie.

Much more so than Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), evading the fate of being Kaplan, Fox has a sense of vulnerability, of being – unsympathetically - thought to be in psychosis, when maybe his big overspilling bundle shows what he says…

A palpable playing with the borderline between being ‘in fear’ and what others will make of one’s fear, this film is a gem, given 9.0 on IMDb.


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Short films at Festival Central

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

28 November

Aline Conti presented six short films last night, some as short as five to seven minutes, which had been presented as an organized sequence under the umbrella The Joy of Six (which is also what a group of Cambridge poets have been calling themselves for many a year) by Soda Pictures and New British Cinema Quarterly.

In conversation with Conti first, and then answering questions from the floor, Dan Sully and Chris Croucher, the director and writer / producer, respectively, of the last two films, were present. They seemed to think of the choice 'a mixed bag', and, when asked, would not have been wished to be placed anywhere else in the running order.

That said, I thought that what connected the films was that they were all psychological in nature, and it was quite an anxious feeling to go where each was leading, and that few, except perhaps Friend Request Pending (2011), gave you an unnecessarily clear sense of who people were and what they were doing.

To do justice to each film, I will have a posting per film, to which the items in the listing below link (all now live - 3 December):


1. Long Distance Information (2011) (7:42)

2. A Gun for George (2011) (17:22)

3. Scrubber (2012) (20:56)

4. Man in Fear (2011) (10:50)

5. The Ellington Kid (2012) (5:00)

6. Friend Request Pending (2011) (11:58)



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