We are pleased to welcome artist/director Jamie Shovlin, writer Mike Harte, composer Euan Rodger and actress Agnes Aspen for a post-screening Q&A chaired by producer Bren O’Callaghan, after the international premiere of Rough Cut on Fri 29 November.
A documentary about a film that never was, Rough Cut – directed by London-based artist Jamie Shovlin – explores the making of 1970s exploitation film Hiker Meat by fictitious Italian director Jesus Rinzoli.
This film-within-a-film operates as both an affectionate homage to and academic deconstruction of the exploitation genre, creating a Frankensteinesque cut-and-paste of the era’s concerns and fascinations and emphasising this often critically maligned filmmaking period’s archetypes and mythologies.
Principal photography for Rough Cut took place in the Lake District in an intense shoot which pulled together two alternate casts (one for live action, the other for dubbed sequences), a fleet of vintage US vehicles, gallons of latex and a puppeteer-controlled B-movie monster, with more teeth than a pond teeming with piranhas.
Key ‘recreated’ sections of Hiker Meat are contrasted with on-set footage and details about the development of the soundtrack, storyboards, design and models, to form a feature-length work which Shovlin describes as a ‘metamentary’. The result strips back the making, un-making and re-making of both the film and the idea, as a kind of ode to the power of imagination.
Rough Cut screens on full release from Fri 6 December.
Reviews
Brit conceptual artist and trickster Jamie Shovlin’s “metamentary” documents the making of imaginary ’70s exploitation film Hiker Meat… This mind-bender sprang out of Shovlin’s fictitious Krautrock band project Lustfaust and is based on his extensive collection of old slasher clips.
Dazed Digital – Top Ten Innovative Documentaries
Shovlin is exploring the gulf between artist and patron, between high art and lowbrow, between fiction and reality.
Zombie Hamster
A genuinely fascinating mix of talking heads, on-set footage and split-screen cinematography.
Movie Man