Renoir Film Screening
6 July, 6pm
Renoir Cinema
Brunswick Square
London, WC1N 1AW
 
  
A great film with a great story behind it, Somers Town is the latest feature film by Shane Meadows, director of This Is England and Once Upon A Time In The Midlands. The film grew out of an idea mooted by London advertising agency, Mother, to Eurostar, as a means of examining the regeneration of the area around St. Pancras. Meadows took the script for a short film by Paul Fraser, which approached the subject through the eyes of two young arrivals to London, and turned the short film into a feature, developed out of intensive rehearsals and improvisation, on the same budget.
Thomas Turgoose, lead actor in This is England plays Tommo, who has just turned sixteen and been released from social care. Tommo runs away to London from a difficult life in the Midlands. Marek, a Polish immigrant, lives with his father, who drinks with his friends after working on a construction site. Marek is a keen photographer, quiet and sensitive - he is not comfortable in his father’s world. Both struggle to make sense of their new world and a chance meeting in Somers Town, London, leads the two to form an unexpected partnership.
Meadows’s intensely personal vision of a forgotten corner of London is shot in black and white. Whilst making more general points about how alienating urban environments can be redeemed through friendship, Somers Town is also a portrait of an area on the cusp of change. ‘During the last year or so travelling from Nottingham to London by train, it was amazing watching the changes happening around the St Pancras area and the idea of making a short film that was set in this period of transition was immediately attractive,’ says Meadows.
A special preview screening of the film will be followed by a panel discussion with Barnaby Spurrier, producer of Somers Town; John McAslan, architect of the Kings Cross extension; and Herbert Wright, journalist and author of London High.
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