Triumph from tragedy: The making of a feature documentary
Charles Miller
edits this blog. Twitter: @chblm
The premiere of a feature-length documentary in London last week was a triumph for first-time film-makers Jimmy Edmonds and Jane Harris.
The 主播大秀 Academy has , A Love that Never Dies, which centres on the tragic death of Jane and Jimmy’s son Josh in a road accident in Vietnam in 2011. After their bereavement, the couple undertook a road trip across the States, filming and interviewing other bereaved parents.
Publicity: the final step in making a film
The Prince Charles theatre was almost full. A show of hands during an introduction to the film revealed that about half the audience were themselves bereaved parents. It was a measure of the very particular appeal of this film.
Jane and Jimmy have struggled to finance and distribute their film because of industry scepticism about how much its ‘difficult’ subject would attract a general audience:
Making your own documentary isn’t a route to riches, Jane and Jimmy cheerfully admit. But they still hope that the cinema tour they have lined up following the premiere will show potential distributors, whether for cinemas or on-demand video services, that there is an audience for their film:
In a question and answer session with the audience after the screening, Jimmy mused that death hasn’t always been a taboo subject: while polite Victorian society was comfortable talking about and photographing death but not sex, we’re the opposite.
One of the reasons Jane and Jimmy wanted to make the film was to cope with the isolation they felt after their bereavement, as friends drifted away, hoping they would soon achieve ‘closure’. That wasn’t how they saw it, and so they embarked on the making of the film as a way of meeting other parents who had lost children.
I asked them whether they had ever felt like giving up on the project. They both admitted there had been hard times, particularly when they realised they would have to expose more of their own grief on camera. It was “awful putting ourselves into the story, but we had to do it,” said Jane:
As to what advice Jimmy would give to anyone thinking of embarking on their own documentary project, he says that there are limits to how much you should worry about your audience: “you need to make the film on your own terms, in your own way.”
is being shown at cinemas around the country, with Jane and Jimmy present to talk about the issues raised.
The of the making of the documentary includes five short films made at different stages of the production.