H2
See examples of Keith's work:
H4
I have shown both my short-form documentaries Becoming Penny and Being Penny at the Electric Palace. The films deal with the decision of a former Electric Palace volunteer to undergo gender transition. Being Penny was shown during Trash Cannes Festival in 2016 as a companion piece to documentarist Michael Yorke’s film Hijra: India’s Third Gender, originally broadcast as part of the BBC’s series of anthropological documentaries, Under the Sun, first screened during the 1990s and now, sadly, unavailable.
xxx
I first fell in love with the moving image watching the first episode of Dr Who aged 10 – and that was compounded by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, broadcast during a BBC 2 retrospective of Tarkovsky’s work at Christmas around 7 years later.
xxx
The film I would like to have made hasn’t been made yet. It would be Quarantine by British author Jim Crace, an alternative account of Christ’s period of isolation in the wilderness – a very different take on that recounted in the bible.
xxx
Almost my work focuses on outsiders and addresses themes of social prejudice or exclusion – whether it be gender identity, sexual orientation, racial or ethnic discrimination or mental illness. My ongoing PhD in visual anthropology looks at societal responses to those who have decided or have been unable to have children. This focus is something I hadn’t realised until responding to this questionnaire.
xxx
I have no plan when I make a film beyond a script for fiction – I don’t storyboard or write a two-column shooting script laying out precise instructions for each shot, etc. I create the space for the performers to do their own thing, and pretty much leave them to it, only giving minimal direction when appropriate. I think precise instructions limit creativity, and I assume the actors will have their own ideas about what the film means, and how to interpret their roles. So far I haven’t been proved wrong. With documentary interviews, if I don’t get the answers to my questions that I want, I ask again, and keep going until I do. I learned this from academic and documentarist Cynthia Weber, whose series of 3-minute films I Am An American is a master class in focus and discipline in documentary filmmaking.
xxx
For me, collaboration is essential in making any film, unless I am making a music video for my band Necessary Animals. My experience has been that both fiction and documentary are shared creative activities, the whole being the sum of the intuitive creativity of all involved that ends up being greater than its parts. For me, if that weren’t the case there’d be no point in doing it.
xxx
In June 2012 I was invited to Romania to screen Becoming Penny as part of LGBTQI+ activist group Accept Bucharest’s week of awareness-raising events, Gay Fest. LGBTQI+ rights in Romania at that time were said to be highly contested by its government and we were warned that we may get confronted or attacked during the festival. The film was screened in the outdoor courtyard of Green Hours, a jazz and theatre café in the heart of Bucharest.
In the event we seemed to attract more curiosity than hostility, with Penny getting wolf-whistled by an underground train driver. The only person in our group to encounter prejudice was my Anglo-Jamaican friend Mario: the proprietor of a convenience store refused to serve him.
After the screening we were besieged by a group of young people who were struggling with their sexual orientation or gender identities, and wanted to tell us about their struggles with prejudice or denial from parents, teachers or friends. It was a series of bitter-sweet encounters.
The following day we joined a Pride march through Bucharest with a police escort, a truly surreal experience. At no time did we feel threatened or intimidated; we only got a sense of fear and frustration from those on the receiving end of discrimination and repression.
xxx
My continuing inspiration as a filmmaker is centred on those spaces in which those living on the margins of conventional society navigate their way through life, and on their responses to social exclusion. This has been a lifelong preoccupation that has only found an outlet in the 15 years since I first started making films, and after 67 years I doubt this will change any time soon.
See examples of Keith's work:
- Becoming Penny - https://youtu.be/m666KTXCe8g
- Being Penny - https://youtu.be/FpFaY4T8RnQ
- The Mariner’s Tale (fiction) - https://youtu.be/K7HmbFYWnmo
- Interview with Steve Hackett (former Genesis guitarist) - https://youtu.be/Ze-35_Y8bd8
- Interview with comic book writer and author Alan Moore - https://youtu.be/5Q2nUh6crJ0