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"Sometimes, we can never return to a place we once belonged…" The
Blackening is a character-driven, engaging drama of international appeal
involving universal themes of family, return from exile and marriage. The
film tells the story of the return of a prodigal son, Magnus, a failed dot-com
millionaire, forced to seek financial help from his family to marry his Argentinian
fiancée. To do so, he must face the traditional blackening ceremony, now
controlled and manipulated by his older brother, with family scores needing to
be settled. The
Blackening takes its name from a pre-Christian marriage tradition of blackening
faces as a good luck symbol, still practiced in rural northern Scotland today,
but now transformed into horseplay involving stripping the captured bridegroom
and blackening his naked body. Set
among the panoramic landscapes, seascapes and stunning skyscapes of the Shetland
Islands, not seen on cinema screens since a 1937 classic of the British cinema, The
Blackening homes in on human conflict between insiders and outsiders, new
values versus old values, the local and the global. Drawing
on influences from two Scottish-inspired classics of British cinema, Michael
Powell’s Edge of the World (1937)
and Powell and Pressburger’s I Know
Where I’m Going (1945) and the family claustrophobia of Thomas
Vintenberg’s dogme testament Festen,
The Blackening also takes a lead from a rich tradition of Scottish film drama
(Bill Douglas and Christopher Rush.) The
Blackening is brought to the screen by a collaborative creative team who develop
across the internet: Alec Bruce,
a writer with a distinctive voice, a product of Moonstone International
screenwriters laboratory. He developed the original Blackening concept on a
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art writer’s course in London. Leslie Lowes,
who learned his production skills with the BBC, is no stranger to the Shetland
location, having lived there for over 20 years and recently, located the feature
Devil’s Gate to the islands. |