BREATHE from Toby Meakins on Vimeo.
Since it's the season of holy ghosts, we thought we'd give you a short film about spirits and sacrifice. But don't expect anything too pious, Breathe is a beautifully nasty piece about two teenagers who dare each other to test out a ghoulish local legend. It stars Josef Altin from Game of Thrones, alongside Jack North and a barely-there Orion Ben.
Toby Meakins, director and co-writer told Londonist: "The idea of a ghost you can only see when you hold your breath is a concept we've been knocking about for around 10 years. It was actually written up into feature form, optioned and developed a few years ago, but the slate it was part of collapsed when the recession hit. The stolen breath/love story element is something quite new; I wanted to take the idea forward and make the story more human, to question how far we are prepared to go for love."
The film was shot in Peckham's atmospheric Caroline Gardens Chapel. "It's a great location visually," says Meakins, "but pretty hard to work out of. The height of the windows combined with not being able to put up lamps outside made the director of photography's job really tough. It's also under a flight path, so recording sound during parts of the day was testing to say the least. But on the flip-side it was a joy to find a location like that in south east London with the transport access."
“London is a great place to inspire filmmakers because it's so diverse and has so much history. Every street has a story to tell, you've just got to look, but most of all you've got to get out and walk. Take a bus or a tube somewhere random that you've not been to before and get off and walk the streets — you can't fail to be inspired."
Want to be featured? If you have a London-themed short film that you’d like us to consider for this series, send an email with the subject “London Shorts” to Stu Black and Ioanna Karavela via our email: [email protected]
To see other London Shorts click here (but please note, links may not always work if the filmmakers are showing their shorts in competition).
