Film Trust Blog

I’ve been in Newcastle for the opening night of the Northern Lights Film Festival, hosted as usual by Tyneside Cinema which this year is relocated to Gateshead Old Town Hall while their building in Pilgrim Street is enhanced and extended.

I’m here partly because the Cambridge Film Trust is putting together a programme of events around the opening of the new building in the Spring, but also because I’m a Geordie and it’s great to have an opportunity to come up to Tyneside and visit Newcastle and Gateshead (and we’ll have none of that ‘NewcastleGateshead’ nonsense here).

I was born in Newcastle and lived in Jarrow until I was four, when my parents moved to the Midlands, so you wouldn’t know from my accent - apart from the hard ‘a’ in Newcastle, perhaps. And I’ve hardly been a regular visitor since we stopped doing family holidays that involved trips to South Shields and Whitley Bay when I was a teenager.  So it’s nice to be working up here, and may even give me a chance to reconnect to the area.

Last night I made it to the Tyneside for the short film showcase, and was pleased I did as there were some excellent films shown, including Zam Salim’s brilliant ‘Laid Off’, about life as a ghost, and Jesse Lawrence’s ‘Mash Up’, haunting in a very different way…

The opening feature was ‘Hvordan vi slipper af med de andre’, which my Danish-speaking friends will know translates as ‘How to Get Rid of the Others’. This dark comedy from Andres Ronnow Klarland is described in programme as ’set in a dytopian Denmark in the not too distant future’, and  it certainly deserves to be called ‘dystopian’.  The Danes have realised that the central state now has enough information on its citizens to do a cost-benefit analysis of each person, and decides to kill off those who are a net drain on resources. The chronically unemployed, feckless, addicted and socially disfunctional are evaluated against the ‘New Copenhagen Criteria’ and those who fail to justify their continued survival are summarily executed.

Set in a school that is being used as a concentration camp over the summer while a good productive Danes are away in the country, the action centres on the relationship between Major Christian Andresson, in charge of trial and executions, politician Volke, there to observe, and activity Silse who has infiltrated a group of misfits held in the school gym while awaiting their turn before the tribunal.

The echoes of Guantanamo are obvious, but the film also made me think of the law of unintended consequences - the New Copenhagen Criteria were a joke, an exercise in data mining carried out by a civil servant who was then surprised to see just how much the economy would improve if the bottom couple of percent of the population was exterminated.  As we move towards a comprehensive national identity register in the UK it’s hard not to see the parallels - especially as I’d travelled to Newcastle after speaking at the London launch of a new Demos pamphlet on personal information and privacy.