The Cold Burden
8 min, United Kingdom, 2009

BEHIND THE SCENES GALLERY POSTER

FILMMAKER’S STATEMENT

This short film is an exploration of an interaction between two human beings in almost the same state of consciousness; both of them have missed many opportunities in life and each one continues to lose ground in his own way. It is not a happy movie. I didn’t write the screenplay of the film to suggest any sort of judgment or conclusion regarding the actions of the characters, although the film still has its own defined point of view that can be felt throughout and in which the main character is mostly the one to blame because he is getting himself into something which can not handle by interfering in someone eles’s life; simply he doesn’t have the capacity to cope with it. In a way I was aware of this fact and so I tried to balance it, somehow unconsciously in order to see or to depict the situation in a new light and to get away from the tendency to show the main character’s behavior necessarily unsympathetic or the tramp’s response a wise one. The way we rehearsed the movie and Julian Bird finally played the character of the tramp shows that he is not in a sound state of mind at all and that makes the situation a little bit more complicated.  I don’t think that a filmmaker needs to know the answer to a dilemma, but the act of observing and the realization of a film can be considered a way, a beneficial vehicle to better understand or feel the subject matter.

As the first moment of drama starts to take shape when Jack is giving the burger to the tramp, we start to wonder about how a new situation might develop out of a pure human’s demand for self-assertion and attention seeking; a sort of delicate expression of self-indulgence which has been portrayed as a simple act of love. But is it really love? Again that was not I wanted to touch as a sort of judgment and trying to label the reason for a human behavior when it can not necessarily be done without compassion. We have seen Jack, go buy a burger to give it to the hungry, but still we can easily doubt his true motivation. It is the tramp who, by challenging Jack and not accepting his charity, acts as an outer reflection of Jack’s inner chaotic condition. The tramp does not care either about the burger or about hurting this guy’s feelings, let’s call him the stronger yet more manipulator character which will define the barrier for Jack, the main character, to get what he wants; Jack tries to satisfy himself through offering something to the tramp without even being asked for and the tramp who knows this fact resist to be a scapegoat for him, hence acting as an obstacle.

The end of the film, has been partially balanced by showing a change in Jack’s expression when he hears his girl friend calling him and leaving a message on the phone. I don’t believe that life should be depicted as a shiny or even as equally distributed states of happiness or unhappiness/sorrow, it could be all dark sometimes and a sudden shock or realization is all that is needed to start a new path. For our fictional character, Jack, the confrontation with the tramp provides that shock, and all that follows is the unspooling of the dilemma which he has been facing.

We put ourselves in the situations that we need in life, and so by this assumption, Jack is also putting himself through a changing situation/experience unconsciously. As the nature of the films , and especially short films demand, all these life dramas should happen in a very quick pace. As life has proved us many times, the outcome we are seeking is not necessarily the one that comes our way. In my opinion the tramp is really helping Jack to realize a misplaced part in his own behavior and judgment. I hope you as an audience enjoy the film and find in it the subtle interactions that are really happening underneath.

This is the main text that needs corrections and proof reading:

Tagline:

“The Art Of Redemption Through Taking Photos”

Excerpt:

A short film about a man in crisis who decides to buy a burger for a hungry local tramp on the way back home from the office. This causes him to get involve in a conflict with somebody who is in a much worse predicament than his own which leads to a fight. All the problems and burdens of that day lead him through a conflict, breakdown and finally the resolution.

SYNOPSIS

THE COLD BURDEN is a simple yet instantaneous and climatic depiction of a confrontation that starts to happen when the main character, Jack, played by French actor Fred Ledoux, decides to uplift himself emotionally by helping out a local tramp played by British actor Julian Bird. Unfortunately for him the situation won’t work out as he imagined it would in his mind. The tramp starts to play back with Jack until the moment that he can not just take it longer. He is already in a very difficult time in his life; he has lost his job and is in a middle of a break-up with his girl friend. But he still wants to further his problems unconsciously by starting an interaction with a person he just simply can not handle by offering him a burger.

After the tramp asks him for money, they start to argue and it quickly descends into a fight and a shouting match. It is exactly what Jack did not want to happen; it adds another weight on top of all his problems/burdens. Just as he thinks that he can not handle himself and all the problems/burdens(?) anymore, his girlfriend calls him. He doesn’t pick up the phone at that moment, but as he listen’s to the girl’s message he starts to see the situation from another point of view.

PRODUCTION NOTES

THE COLD BURDEN was filmed over two days, with a small, talented team of artists who each took on different roles to get the job done as economically and efficiently as possible. For the middle scene which was supposed to be recorded on the street we thought that it is better to shoot it with minimum number of crew in order to facilitate the traveling and also because that particular scene didn’t need the lighting for the cinematographer, Christopher Patterson, decided to use only the available light. So we lowered the number of production crew to one third when we moved to shoot these scenes. For the last scene in Jack’s room we had a larger crew in order to achieve the subtle lighting effect and decorations.

The rehearsals with the actors happened over three sessions with almost 5-6 hours of practice each time. The whole action, from the time that Jack gives the burger to the tramp to the moment that he runs away from the scene needed to be happen in a fairly short amount of time, almost two minutes and so both of the actors were ready to invent different ways of personal expressions in order to convey the intense and almost immediate action that were happening in the story as quick as possible. Also they were both aware that we needed to shoot this part of the film fairly quickly because of the nature of the actions and dialogues we didn’t really have the capacity to shoot them over and over again on a local street were people live and children passes by. Creating and building the dynamics of the scene from the moment in which the tramp accepts the burger to the moment of climax and fighting was the main challenge for both actors, mainly because they were trying to find a way to balance between what was originally on the script and the primary vision of the director on one hand and their spontaneous reactions to each moments of the scene on the other. As a result we changed the script several times during rehearsals by adding and removing some lines of dialogue and shifting the beats back and forth.  There were several beats in the scene that needed to be touched and express without any gap as the pace of the scene would demand that. Fred Ledoux preformed a brilliant part in the ending scenes which changes the mood and defines the theme of the movie so clearly.

For the music for the film we asked the talented composer James Jones to join the team.  His music added another level of texture to the picture; accompanying many of the scenes with a slow and sad score, which contributes as an element of melancholy beauty to the narrative. The sound was a mixture of recording on the set and some follies which has been recorded during the editing process.