No Special Place (excerpt one). Click on the right to see further excerpts.

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.

Written, filmed and edited: Daniel Jewesbury (with material from Bhowani Junction used by kind permission of Lawrence Pollinger Associates for the Estate of John Masters)
Victoria: Rachel Fishwick / Lydia Piechowiak
Patrick: Edward Fulton
Ranjit: Jin Sangha
Rodney: Paul Betts
Rose Mary: Rebecca Bowden
the voices of: Tanya McGill, Elise Taylor, Alistair Wilson

Sound recordist: Paul Moore
Production assistant: Mary McIntyre

Produced with funds from Awards for All (Northern Ireland), the Centre for Media Research at the University of Ulster, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the British Council.

© Daniel Jewesbury

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