Under the Mud

JULY 6, 2007

6.5/10. Seen at the Cambridge Film Festival this ‘deep’ indie feature was made on a shoe-string and written collaboratively with young Liverpublians from a youth centre in Garsett. The film struggles a little at the start, not helped by sound problems and hard to understand accents (one section of the film is briefly subtitled to aid the viewer). But from there it builds well with some excellent moments of humour and an endearing surrealism (most evident in a nocturnal joyride initiated by car-made youngster).

Aside on licensing: in the post film Q&A I asked, given their current struggle to find a distribrutor, whether they had considered using a Creative Commons license and then allowing downloading. The Director replied that they had definitely considered this option, however currently they only have a ‘festival license’ for the music and so were not in a position to legitimately put the film up for download. Apparently they’re looking for around 80k to clear the music rights (which is almost twice the film’s 45k budget) and they have already stripped some tracks out to bring the cost down (one piece of Pink Floyd was going to require 3 times what the film cost to make).