Enys Men

Product Information

On-stage interview with Mark Jenkin and Mary Woodvine by film critic Mark Kermode at BFI Southbank (2022, 29 mins) The Duchy of Cornwall (1938, 15 mins): a rapid survey of early Cornish history looks at the county's language, landscape and industries Scovell, Adam (12 January 2023). "Enys Men: The films that frighten us in unexplainable ways". BBC Culture . Retrieved 15 January 2023.

Jenkin and Monk build their crew from regular collaborators who live and work in Cornwall, and this team also comprised a number of students, graduates and staff from Falmouth University, working as core parts of the film crew during the shoot in West Cornwall in the spring of 2021 and later post-production, the film having been mixed by School of Film & Television lecturer Rich Butler in Falmouth’s own dubbing theatre. Some will be left confused – even frustrated – by a narrative that slips between dreams and reality Mary Woodvine mesmerises in Mark Jenkin’s superbly haunting Cornish gem.” – Mark Kermode, Kermode & Mayo’s Take The critically acclaimed mind-bending folk horror, Enys Men is set for Dual Format Edition (Blu-ray/DVD) and the simultaneous exclusive streaming release on BFI Player from May. Kermode, Mark (15 January 2023). "Enys Men review – Mark Jenkin's Cornish psychodrama will sweep you away". The Guardian . Retrieved 15 January 2023.

Side guide

Some of my choices are linked to Enys Men through form, others by content; but in most cases, hopefully by a bit of both. After all, the greatest films mesh the two in a way that makes it hard to tell where one starts and the other finishes. The Guardian’s review by Peter Bradshaw describes it as “a supremely disquieting study of solitude….Jenkin’s style is so unusual, so unadorned, it feels almost like a manuscript culture of cinema. There is real artistry in it.” John Nugent at Empire magazine describes him as “one of the most exciting cinematic voices in the UK right.” In April 2023 Enys Men will be released on BFI Blu-ray/DVD (Dual Format Edition) with contextual extras and on BFI Player where it will join Bait and a selection of Jenkin’s early work. Sales are through Protagonist Pictures. Her life is quiet, punctuated by the occasional scratchy rumblings of a radio and the starter cord motor for her petrol generator, on which she is dependent for power. At bedtime she reads an environmental manifesto, Blueprint for Survival. Her relationship with Boswens is strange; the volunteer seems alone – but is she? The 1970s saw a wealth of films deal with the decidedly strange atmospheres of English landscapes in a similar fashion – films such as David Gladwell's Requiem for a Village (1976), Peter Hall's Akenfield (1974), both set in Suffolk, and Philip Trevelyan's Sussex-centred documentary The Moon and the Sledgehammer (1971). All of these mix documentary aesthetics and a desire to capture life in the countryside with stranger elements, whether it be people rising from their graves, as in Gladwell's film, or overlapping time periods, as in Hall's.

Jenkin's film is a perfect, anti-romantic expression of Cornish eeriness. "There is certainly a level of abstraction that comes from shooting small-gauge film," he says of his trusty Bolex 16mm camera, "but most of the eerie comes later in the process, [in] how the images bump up against each other and most importantly how the sound works with, and against, the image.” Enys Men was released on dual format Blu-ray and DVD on 8 May 2023 via BFI distribution. [21] References [ edit ] Ella Turner, who worked as a production coordinator on the shoot and herself a graduate from Falmouth, explains: “The students showed their hard work and keenness to learn right from day one, using their initiative throughout the shoot, fitting in with all departments and always ready to help out. I loved working with the team, it’s so relieving when you can rely on someone to get on with things.” As identified by Macfarlane and others, the eerie acts as a kind of counter-tradition to the romantic Pastoralism of English art; rather than portraying the English countryside as a place of chocolate-box fantasy, it has often zoned in on specific rural localities and tried to convey their haunted essences that are beyond the understanding of urbanite considerations. BBC Culture spoke to Jenkin about his new film and the preoccupations of his work. "I was a rural kid," he suggests when asked of his influences, "and I suppose I always seemed to be attracted to the dark side of things, a desire to be a bit scared, but to also look at the flip side of the idyll. Part of that is a reaction against the way that Cornwall is idealised and romanticised."

Rate And Review

Set in 1973, unfolds atmospherically on an unpopulated island off the Cornish coast. There, a single volunteer ( Mary Woodvine) recording data on an unfamiliar flower finds her lonely daily observations turning troublingly towards the strange and metaphysical, forcing her to question what is real and what is nightmare. Is the barren landscape not just alive… but also sentient? Lichen appears on one of the flowers and then spreads to places you would not easily imagine. People begin to appear without any explanation. The woman looks into a bedroom and is unsurprised to see a dark-haired girl (played by Flo Crowe) sleeping there. Who is she? A younger version of herself? Her daughter? A hallucination? A ghost? Mark Jenkin isn’t a director with any inclination to spoonfeed audiences what to think. The film was promoted bilingually, with posters being produced in both English and Cornish. [9] [10] It was thought to be the first instance of a distributed feature film having Cornish posters. [9] Reception [ edit ] Critical [ edit ]