Press Release
New film from award-winning female filmmaker: This Family
Director D R Hood’s critically acclaimed first feature Wreckers, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Claire Foy and Shaun Evans was nominated for best British debut at the London International Film Festival, won the Perspectives Competition at Moscow IFF, was screened on the BBC and has been seen worldwide. Wreckers was distributed by Artificial Eye in the UK who described it as:
“a debut which changed the face of British Cinema” – Artificial Eye
Hood’s second feature film This Family will be filming late spring, with Diana Quick and Robert Sheehan currently attached as part of a large ensemble cast. Hood is currently crowd funding to raise money to make the film, a story that has been close to her heart for over fifteen years.
This Family is the story of Owen, his mother Marianne, and his extended family. The Withnail generation had children… and Owen is one of them. In thrall to his mother, Marianne, a starlet in her youth – at least in her own mind, Owen and the family gather at their crumbling farmhouse for her last birthday. They slaughter a pig and prepare for battle…
This Family explores the dark rich territory of family life, memory and history. While the story is frequently comedic, on a deeper level the film will explore lifecycles and generations passing through a single place, an old house saturated in history on the edge of the moors.
Hood and her award-winning cinematographer, Annemarie Lean-Vercoe, began shooting fragments of the film in September and have developed an extraordinary new form to tell the story: placing the core drama in a mosaic of fragments of experience and memory – ‘a documentary of the soul’, using rehearsal and theatre in a filmic way.
“A handsome debut… there is a strikingly confident voice here which marks [Hood] out as a talent to watch” – Fionnuala Halligan, Screen International
Prior to Wreckers, Hood made multiaward winning short films Journey Man, with Ruth Madoc, and The Other Man, with BAFTA winner Anna Maxwell Martin; she has also directed for theatre.
Kickstarter: This Family aims to raise £30,000 through their crowd funder campaign which ends 9th March 2016