Yesterday I mentioned Spike Jonze’s gorgeous looking film I’m Here, a love story featuring 2 robots living in Los Angeles. Spike, in addition to being a film writer, director and producer is also co-founder and creative director of the news and culture website VBS.TV, you may recall I mentioned their recent Vice Guide to Liberia.
VBS.TV have a new feature coming out on 12 February which is a love story of an altogether different kind. Swansea Love Story is about the largely unreported heroin epidemic in South Wales. The film takes an intimate look at the lives of a gang of young addicts, their families and their surroundings. It also examines how unemployment, the breakdown of the family and the nature of love contribute to the dilemmas faced by a group of young people.
The film is co-directed and produced by Vice UK’s editor Andy Capper and Mike Leigh’s son, Leo and was filmed between Spring to Winter 2009 after Andy and Leo made contact with a gang of young addicts through the SANDS drugs agency.
Focussing on Amy & Cornelius, Lee & Leanne, Clint, Kristian and Wills; Andy and Leo following them around their daily lives as they struggle to get money to buy drugs, alcohol and for places to live. During the course of the film, characters get clean and relapse, they fall in and out of love and you get to meet their families and drugs workers. You also get to meet their drug dealers as well as members of Swansea’s mining and docker community who talk about how the city has changed. In place of industry there are bars, strip joints and cheap booze outlets and racial tension often spills over into public protest and violence.
Here’s a short trailer for the film which will be released over 6 days from 12 February 2010 only on VBS.TV
