Accident
Live-action drama, UK, 2003
Director: James Leech
Writer: James Leech
Language:English
Colour: Colour
Runtime: 10 minutes
Short synopsis
An accident in a busy London street brings the fears and feelings of a mixed crowd to the surface.
Long synopsis
Accident opens with a panning shot, skimming the top of London's skyline. Images are layered on top of one another and fade in and out, setting a dream-like contrast to the hectic and disorienting rhythm of the rest of the film. The film is mostly shot with a handheld digital camera.
Two casually dressed young white men talk animatedly as they walk along a narrow street. They have a short confrontation with a distressed olive-skinned man trying to explain something in a foreign language who then runs off in the opposite direction. They soon arrive at the scene of a recent accident on a busy junction.
A man dressed in a business suit yells for help as he kneels by an injured man lying on the road. People start to gather, some just looking on helplessly, others trying to be of help, but mostly just adding to the panic and confusion. Finally two policemen arrive and, in their attempt to control the enlarging crowd of voyeurs, one officer gets into a clash with the two men from the first scene.
The people are hostile to the police's appeal for information and offer no insight into the accident; instead they express personal concerns in an elliptical and fragmentary way. The disorientating rhythm of the fades is matched by a muffled soundtrack; the combination of the two creating a sense of disconnection from the action. In the shots of the crowd the camera seems to move among the people, catching snippets of conversation that are layered to create the dense sequence of events.
An ambulance arrives and it becomes clear that the unconscious man is in a critical condition. As the police coax the businessman away from him, he tells them that he saw the driver run off. The police find the injured man's wallet on the floor and ask around if anybody knows or recognises him, or if anybody speaks 'Iraqi'. This instigates an argument between an Asian woman (assumed by the police to speak 'Iraqi') and an elderly black man about racism in their community, which makes some of the people around them laugh cynically. In the background the injured man is put in a neck brace and wheeled towards the ambulance. People mill around, commenting on the event and other issues. One of the two young men wants to leave, but the other one insists they stay. The medics state that there is no pulse or eye-movement, and it seems as if the man may be dead.
The police try to clear the road and tell the two men to leave, but one still doesn't want to. He sees the olive-skinned man, who has just reappeared, and tries to tell the policeman. Impatiently, the policeman tells him to 'move on' and waves him away. The young man hesitates, then he just spits defiantly, looking at the police officer, and leaves saying nothing. Later a street cleaner sweeps the road where the accident had happened. A 'Can you help?' sign stands next to black cabs driving over the spot where the injured man lay; the traffic is dense, and life continues as usual.
Background information
About the film
Accident was made with funding from Film London's PULSE, an initiative launched in partnership with UK Film Council's New Cinema Fund in 2002. The scheme is aimed at giving new directors who live or work in London the chance to work with digital film-making tools on a short film with a maximum budget of £10,000 and a time limit of ten minutes, and won the Bronze Bear at Festival Der Nationen, Ebensee, Germany in 2004
About the film-maker
James Leech, born in London in 1965, left school at 16, 'directionless', as he says, until discovering the films of Robert Breer and Stan Brakhage in the early 1990s. He immediately started working on his own film, taking evening classes in Art, English Literature and Language and did a Foundation in Documentary at Brixton College, 1992-93. After graduating from Central St Martin's with a BA in Fine Art (Film), he attended the National Film and Television School. During his time at the NFTS, he became very interested in mise-en-scène, drama, and scriptwriting. His graduation film Instrumental was screened at several international film festivals.
Leech has worked for Sherbert on adverts projected in Piccadilly Circus. He wrote and directed Accident, his first live-action film. Leech is now working with production company BreakThru on a feature film script, Happy Hour, a low-budget London crime drama.
Teaching materials and additional materials
The teaching materials have been developed by practising teachers to provide a springboard for your own work with your students. Feel free to use and adapt them appropriate to your students' needs.
The additional materials, provided by the film-makers, can be used to develop your work with the film and deepen students' understanding of the process of film-making.
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