selfie

Exciting times for Beg Steal Borrow Films!

As final touches are put on to Ur: The End of Civilization in 90 Tableaux (with festival submissions to take place as soon as is ready), and as Selfie is about to go into post-production, shooting is about to begin on new zero-budget feature, The New Hope.

The New Hope is an adaptation of the first part of Miguel de Cervantes’ classic novel, Don Quixote. It tells the story of a man who claims to be Obi Wan Kenobi, and who spends his time going around London trying to right wrongs as per the old Jedi knight errant way.

Oh, and this Obi Wan also challenges Ewan McGregor to a duel – in order to prove that he really is Obi Wan Kenobi and not just some actor playing the part.

The film features Beg Steal Borrow regulars Dennis Chua, Alastair Trevill, Kristina Gren, Nick Marwick, Andrew Slater, Alastair Hird and Deanne Cunningham. And the film will of course be lensed in part by the ever-present and wonderful Tom Maine. Alexandra Brown will also have a brief role in the film – together with her gorgeous new daughter, Ariadne Bullen.

And the film will also feature new Beg Steal Borrow collaborators, including Aleksander Zerov Krawec, Grace Ker, Samuel Taylor, Millad Khonsorkh, Lucia Williams and others.

Filming takes place in and around Hyde Park between 23 and 25 August and 30 and 31 August. A whole feature in a five day shoot!

Passers by by are welcome to interact and to change the film if they spot us.

Otherwise, here’s a teaser featuring Obi Wan and a statue of Karl Marx – explaining how being, rather than acting a Jedi knight is the new source for hope in a world that’s blowing itself to pieces right now.

Preparations are under way for a whole slate of Beg Steal Borrow productions.

First off, there is a film called Selfie, an essay-film that blends fiction and documentary and which consists uniquely of selfies of/by William Brown. William has nearly finished all photography for this film, having been actively shooting during February and March 2014.

The film is a consideration of the selfie phenomenon – but made ‘from within’ (i.e. by taking selfies). Selfie features sequences shot in London, Basel, Paris, Seattle and elsewhere.

Beg Steal Borrow are also hoping to bring to production a pair of films over the summer. The first, tentatively entitled The Life Automatic, is about a young girl who must find her friend in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, in order to return to her some money that she has ropped.

The second, provisionally called The Rebirth of Metaphysics, is a London-based film shot in two parts, the first about a young boy who befriends a tramp, and the second about the rocky nature of the marriage of the child’s parents.

Cinematographer Tom Maine and director William Brown are also in discussion to find dates to begin shooting a vox pop documentary in London called Circle/Line, in which the filmmakers, in the spirit of Chronicle of a Summer and Le Joli Mai, ask Londoners how they are feeling.

Finally, various of the Beg Steal Borrow team have submitted an application to the iFeatures scheme run by Creative England, the BFI, BBC Films and Creative Skillset, in order to win money to produce William’s script, Assisted Living, which is a quasi-autobiographical account of a weekend-in-the-life of a middle class family in Worcestershire.

Fingers crossed that the application garners some interest!

Here comes The New Hope

Preparation under way for new Beg Steal Borrow films