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Hammer and FlameDirected by Vaughan Pilikian
Vaughan Pilikian Vaughan Pilikian is a writer, director and artist who lives and works in London. His films have screened at festivals across the globe; his short fiction Mummers won the award for Best Sound at Filmstock 2004 and was nominated for Der Leo at the Braunschweig International Filmfest. Hammer and Flame was funded through Screen South's Digital Shorts programme and has gone on to screen internationally at over fifty festivals, winning the awards for Best Documentary at the Golden Apricot International Film Festival in Armenia and Best Film in the International Competition at Malescorto, Italy. Currently he is working on a short film commission for the Grierson Trust to be screened later in the year on BBC4. He has a feature film in development about death, sex and suicide in a house on a hill somewhere in the wilds of England. He is also developing a four-part feature documentary based on the themes of Hammer and Flame.
Links www.unruowe.com
Watch a clip from Hammer and Flame
Notes on the death of a ship Places of death always provoke visceral emotion but few are as awesome as Alang. This is not a graveyard for people: the deceased are some of the biggest ships in the world. Driven into the sand at high tide, these great and mournful behemoths stand revealed as the waves recede like the collapsed monuments of a lost civilisation. Their ghostly towers and hulls are demolished by a workforce of men and women, largely from the poorer parts of the subcontinent, who work with nothing more than winches, old hammers and blow torches.
Although the prime harvest is steel, everything is salvaged, from propellors and engines to ship’s manuals and the crew’s crockery. At its height in the mid-nineties, the industry at Alang employed some thirty thousand workers in its one hundred and fifty plots. Although it has suffered from the attacks of environmentalists and the exigencies of global economics, the majority of the world’s decommissioned shipping stock still arrives there as scrap, and the shanty town alongside the yards is home to several thousand workers who labour from dawn until nightfall and beyond for a dollar a day.
Controversy surrounds Alang, expressed both in India and abroad in rumour, myth, accusation and counter-accusation. Ships are dense shells of toxic material, and while the Western owners and brokers largely evade responsibility for a ship’s disposal once a sale is made, worker welfare and environmental concerns are not of signal importance for buyers in India. Explosions caused by pockets of oil trapped inside derelict tankers have claimed the lives of dozens of workers, and the devastating longterm effects of asbestos inhalation are still being bleakly reckoned up. For the government of Gujarat it is a sensitive matter; they are well aware that most of the media attention Alang has received from the West has become part of the campaign calling for greater regulation of the industry.
Only after long negotiation did we become the first British crew to be allowed access to the yards. We had read and seen the reports, but nothing could prepare us for what we found. A mysterious, shattered city rose and fell, its citizens carrying out tasks seemingly without purpose or end yet doing so with a focus and dilligence that belied the almost inconceivable difficulty of pulling apart the gargantuan structures lying on the shore. They worked methodically and silently, perhaps grown tired of competing with the deafening diesel throb of the cranes and the blowtorches’ serpent’s hiss.
As the landscape shifted around us, at some moments the half-demolished shells took on the appearance of bombed-out tenements, at others the grandeur of ruined temples. Conditions were wretched and the work fraught with danger, but the place had an apocalyptic and savage beauty against which words failed and arguments — however decent or expedient — seemed glib or ineffectual. In response we tried to tune ourselves to the pulse of Alang, to bear witness, to summon up its enigma on screen.
Our film is not so much a documentary as a fragment from elsewhere, a brief illumination of a world at the border of what we might care to imagine. On this edge between the land and the sea is a place which we visit in the cinema as we might the banks of the Styx in dreams.
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Does God Play FootballDirected by Michael Walker
Michael Walker Winner and Nominee of ten international awards for his most recent short Does God Play Football, writer/director Mike Walker started his career editing dramas and documentaries for the BBC. Leaving to work independently Michael has gone on to write both shorts and feature films, with produced work selected for the London Film Festival, invited for selection at the BAFTA short film awards, nominated Best Newcomer Directors Guild Award as well as many other accolades at national and international festivals.
Watch Does God Play FootballWindows Media Player Low : Med : High
Links: Does God Play Football on Britfilms.com Watch more Films on BBC Film Network
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There is a place on the coast of northern India where ships come to die. This film opens a window on this strange, disturbing and hallucinatory world, where men and women labour day and night to break down the giants of the ocean piece by piece using only the simplest of tools.