"SLIM"

My time as a bartender in a small independent village bar on the outskirts of Manchester gave me the opportunity to meet many people from all different walks of life - one of those patrons was John Darwin. I had been serving him for quite a while who eventually became one of my valued regulars. We bonded over our love for literature, films and music and was surprised to discover that he was a published poet.

One rainy midweek afternoon, he came in for his pint of ale, enquiring if I "knew anything about cameras?"; he wanted to record one of his new poems to help promote his latest collection which was to be published later that year, titled "Ultrasilence". Being a creative and wanting to experiment with filmmaking, I asked him out of curiosity, "Instead of just recording a live reading, why don't we make a short film?"

Myself and my partner, Kelsey Mowat had recently established 'Noir Pictures' as a production company and I had been toying around with a concept where a film's structure would be completely inverted and the audience would follow the protagonist from B to A, rather than vice versa. This would allow the film's narrative to not only focus on where the protagonist was going, but where they were coming from. Using John's poetry as the driving force, thought-provoking imagery, immersive sounds and liminal locations that inspired the three of us, we wanted to produce a film that was as ambiguous as possible that didn't just visualise his words, but emphasize the emotions behind them to elevate them entirely, with the hope of leaving a lasting impression on our audience.