Lightly Covered with Buttoned Cloth
“I think also that our bodies are in truth naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.” Virginia Woolf
A trilogy film project directed by Poppie Sköld and written by Ben Webb. A labour of love, which grew organically over the course of three years and involved nearly 50 collaborators along the way.
Each film concerns itself with a discreet set of characters living in contemporary London. Viewed individually or as the broader triptych, themes and ideas thread their way through, creating a cumulatively coherent world.
The first film is about togetherness, the second loneliness and the third community. They are all about relationships in the simplest, widest and most radical sense. Moments of revelation and recognition around everyday actions point not to a common humanity, but more to the vital differences between people and how we negotiate them as human beings. The films are constructed out of a radical kindness – holding off from the violence of narrative and action, allowing moments of being as much as moments of doing.
Writer Emma Adams has said: “The revolution will be kind and will acknowledge human frailty or it will not happen at all. For me, that is what the combined force of this work calls its audience to think and feel and know in their bones. Rare work indeed.”
Director/Producer/Editor: Poppie Sköld
Writer: Ben Webb
DoP: Paul Teverini
Cast: Emma Pallant, Jamie Griffith-Jones, Janet Henfrey, Sam Collings, Carys Lewis and Laura Corbett.
Screenings: London Short Film Festival, London Independent Film Festival, Underwire
