Grow Your Own Movie

[GIULIA]

Went to the UK Premiere of this new movie at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall on Monday. The story is essentially about the project we have running in the city here to help assylum seekers and other refugees who've been particularly traumatised through the therapy of growing veg. A laudable scheme which is rapidly running out of funding unfortunately. Anyhow I found some of the allotment characters a bit too stereotyped but it was certainly entertaining, some good jokes and the child actors in it are exceptional. Good family viewing, which will no doubt be out on DVD in the not too distant future if you don't catch it on general release (end of this week). At the premiere they showed a short film made by film-students on how they made the artificial allotments to film on - my what hard work! The living props required were legion because they had to film Spring one week and mid-Summer the next, so all the veg plants had to be dug up and changed for more mature ones.
They filmed the trial scenes for this on our allotments in Liverpool and realised they couldn't run camera dollies on real plots (result, quagmire in two days) so they made fake plots with wide concrete runways which they hid with roll-out turf for the long shots. All very clever!

[Jenny Green]

I'll definitely try to get and see that. No doubt I'll have problems as with all the good films which are never on at our local cinema, only Hollywood sh*te.
When I first read your title I thought it was advice on growing a wholly strange and unusual plant!
Reading about the problems they had filming the allotment scenes reminds me of an episode of The Good Life where Tom pulls a lettuce from the ground to give to Jerry. Lovely lettuce - managed to grow without any roots!

[Chantal]

We appear to have the same problem Jenny, I'll have to look further afield as Seedling and have promised ourselves a night out.