Project: Tupilak II

 
We screened the film in a little cafe in Hackney, to a group of friends and family. We were lucky to do so before Covid appeared! The full film is available to view here.

For 500 years, the Norse Greenlanders made their home in the wilderness.

In 1450, they disappeared without a trace.

an Andrew Hall film | TUPILAK | starring Lily Taylor | cinematography Ashley Hughes

with Alex Newton | music Jordan Dobbins | design Matthew Ceo

special thanks to Bec Taylor | Alex Wagner | YHA Idwal Cottage

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Project: Tupilak

Almost two years since working on The Beachcomber (see my previous post on making films), I joined up with Andrew and Ashley (and our friend Alex) to begin filming our new project - Tupilak. We spent five days wandering around the mountains of the Idwal Valley in Snowdonia, in costume, transporting ourselves back into the 1500s with the help of some cast iron grates, heavy pans, a fishing spear (made from a gardening tool), and one sad little fish (from the supermarket). We imagined what life would be like for the last Norse Greenlander, alone and barely surviving. 

The project was inspired by an article from Ernest journal about the magical totems carved by the Inuit people of Greenland to deter enemies and the inadequately-explained disappearance of the community of Norse Greenlanders in around 1500 AD. I led our research - reading about the buildings and artefacts that remained - and from there we crafted the script. 

Andrew, on the 'tupilak' itself: "Acquiring a tupilak carved by a Greenland-based craftsperson was one of the key artistic decisions we made for the production. I thought it was important to have a daily reminder on location of the powerful history and wicked intent that was bound up in these objects, echoing the RSC’s use of a real skull in its traditional Hamlet stagings. We had previously stumbled across an Inuit art gallery on Paris’ Right Bank which sold a range of carved figures including replica tupilaks [I remember this day! It felt like a sign], but although we certainly hope that ours is no more real in the ominous sense, I felt that getting one from Greenland was important. In an age of lazy cultural appropriation, I thought the very least we could do was strive to work with authentic source material."

This was one of the most exhausting and rewarding projects I've worked on so far. Racing the sunset down the mountain. Chasing birds in the sky. Walking back and forth between the hostel and the hills. Paddling in freezing waters - as seems to be my calling card, now. Breathing in woodsmoke and waking up with the smell in my hair and my skin. Carrying two books around with me but never getting the chance to open either one of them. Drinking beers at the end of the day and cooking huge dinners and watching the footage back. Dealing with problems - a broken SD card, a missing charger cable, a misplaced fish. And then - at the end of it all - finding a knoll that caught the sunrise between the trees, with a view over the valley, and sitting there alone for five, ten, twenty minutes, and listening to the birds and then the silence - as if I were the only one left. 

You can see a trailer for the film here. 

(From Paris)

L x

Project: Mabel and Mickey II

 A few pictures of the process - from making our flyers and press releases, to script-editing, to teching (and learning how to use the tech box in the space of one afternoon), to finishing our first show.

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Project: Mabel and Mickey

I've spent the last year co-producing and directing a one-woman show - it's a mixture of spoken word, true crime, biography, and shadow puppetry. It's been performed at the Wandsworth Arts Festival, Camden People's Theatre, the Roundhouse, and now at Underbelly in Edinburgh. 

I shot and edited this trailer just as it began to snow back in March. The snow settled and lay on the ground for days. It got so cold that the water pipes in our part of South London burst and we were cut off completely for a while. It felt like camping - collecting drips in big pans, showering at the swimming pool. I think Mabel was trying to tell us something. I think she'll probably haunt us all forever after this.

I played around with a few video formats - spoof vlogs, deleted scenes, a haunted camera roll (our house got broken into and we filmed the wreckage afterwards, but decided it was too sad to make into a proper video). I'll post some here, as a record.

Finally, our teaser trailer - which I had the great pleasure to see played all over Edinburgh on big screens. Wonderful!

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Making Films: Every story tells a picture

Every story tells a picture, every picture tells a story. My literary obsessions seem to work this way, with hard-edged moments glowing out from the pages and insisting that I return to them again and again. Solid objects hover in and around these moments, a pearl dropped and found (or unfound) in pale blades of grass, a smoothed shard of sea glass, ocean-green and softly grained, a gold chain nailed to a tree. More recently - an oval stone, rounded, almond-eyed, a human head, levitating, tapping at the skylight. A man, dead, ancient, lying on a beach and turning slowly into a tree. A leaf, full. A watch, removed from the wrist and flung, sideways, into a canal. The undoneness of the thing. The absolute not-doneness of it.

I chased that vision of sea glass, like John of 'Solid Objects', taking his role as he surrendered everything for the pursuit of fragments - the resulting film became another of these fragments, a short 5-minute piece of film, cut and stuck into sequence. Screening 'The Beachcomber' for the first time in Oxford, in the company of my most wonderful friends, was one of the best things of the past year. In November, we screened it again at Picturehouse Central, which was another highlight of the year and of my move to London. With the addition of Jordan's score - which is perfect - the film was properly whole and complete. (I think, or, at least, hope, that Woolf would have approved.) Thank you so much to all of my friends who came to see it twice!

With that moment deliberated and revised, translated, screened, and concluded, I'm ready to greet the next one. This time, the watch and the collage, the conversation by water. The challenge of dialogue and 16mm film. I've been warned of the difficulties of casting and 30-second takes (turns out it's much easier when the only character is me and the most difficult direction is stepping painfully into pebble-churning, freezing waves in the early morning). I have a week at home to deliberate script cuts and tweaks, to ruminate on the best pictures for this particular story. For now, I don't want to give away any more. But it is all very exciting - festooned in the additional excitement of Christmas as I travel home through solid, grey, Shropshire fog.

L x