Lewes screening as film-maker engages with post-Brexit “chaos”

Shot entirely on Super 8 partly in order to integrate old home movie footage, and partly as a way of “replicating the visual look of the post-war consensus”, There’s Another Country reflects not just on the recent experience of the pandemic, but on traumas both in Martin’s own family history as well as in London in World War Two and finally through an account of the biggest industrial accident ever to happen in the UK in 1913.

“I was in my kitchen where I spend 95 per cent of my time ever since I retired and I don't know how you end up writing what you end up writing but I was just driven mad by the way the government was fouling up the management of Covid and the fact of having Johnson as Prime Minister,” Martin recalls. “It was all making me very angry and I just started jotting down a few ideas. There were two things that I didn't understand and still struggle to understand which is how can people that are so bad, even corrupt, be in positions of power and also how can people vote for and believe in these people that are so manifestly untrustworthy. The first thing that happened was that I invented a character called Brighton Jesus to whom I could address all my questions about the mess that we were in and get an answer and then I also started doing some research into my own family history which is how I spent the Covid time. I was reading a lot and trying to understand why people behave the way they do and vote the way they do and I ended up trying to understand and writing a monologue that addressed the underlying principles of right-wing behaviour. And then I realised that it was looking pretty bleak and I knew that I had to try and put some hope into it so I settled on Preston Park as an image of a place where people can meet, in the open, where people can be happy. I also went up and saw the Covid memorial wall and I ended up with a lot of footage that I didn't know how I was going to put together. But I also researched into my family history. I had always known that my father was born in South Wales and there had been a big mining disaster five years before he was born. It seemed to me there was a parallel with the pandemic.”