No Special Place

2012, 35 minutes

Brilliant and provocative...

No Special Place is an eccentric, experimental film exploring biography, memory and race. Its script mixes material appropriated from John Masters’s 1954 novel Bhowani Junction, set amongst the Anglo-Indian community immediately prior to Indian independence, with monologues written in the central characters’ voices. Its fractured narrative of unreliable memories takes place somewhere between Masters’s fictional India and the London of my own (Anglo-Indian) background. The central character, Victoria Jones, is played by two separate actors who draw out the conflict of her relation to her place and to her self. No Special Place investigates the uncertainty of all the stories of self that we spend a lifetime constructing and occupying. The piece was shot in London and Belfast in the summer of 2007, and initially presented at Void in Derry as a two-screen installation. The piece was then edited into a single-screen version for festival screening.

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