This Is England Case Study

Certification:
18 (in the UK)

Reason for certification:
(By the BBFC) for the strong political opinions on the National Front, racist language and numerous scenes of violence expressed throughout the film.In spite of this some councils such as Bristol, Camden and Westminster have overturned this as they felt the film should ‘more widely reach its target audience of teenagers’.

Locations:
Mainly shoot in Nottingham’s residential areas, as well as St Ann's, Lenten and The Meadows. One sequence of the film with abandoned houses at the former airbase RAF Newton was just outside of Bingham, Nottinghamshire. The opening fight scene was filmed at Wilsthorpe Business and Enterprise College (a secondary school in Derbyshire).Cleethorpes, North Lincolnshire for the end credits. Supplementary scenes were filmed in Turgoose’s hometown of Grimsby.

Production Companies:
Big Arty Productions
EM Media
Film4
Optimum Releasing
Screen Yorkshire
UK Film Council
Warp Films

Special Effects:
MotionFX (digital intermediate)
Other Companies:
Abadia Catering
Anglo American Filming Vehicles tracking vehicles (as Anglo American)
Arn Lighting equipment
Barclays Bank PLC banking services
Chitwell Van Hire vehicle hire
Clearing House, The clearances
DeLuxe Laboratories prints by
EM Foundation publicity: UK
Developed by EM Media
Film Finance completion guarantor (as Film Finances Inc.)
Film Lab North rushes processing
Developed by FilmFour
Ice Films camera and grip equipment (as ICE Films)
Ice House accommodation
Kodak film stock
Kodak filmed on
Media Insurance Brokers insurance (as Media Insurances Brokers)
Movie Makers facilities vehicles
Premiere Travel Inn hotel
Saco World accommodation
Sapex Scripts post-production script
Spool Post Production audio & offline post facility
Trans Sport rigging equipment (as Trans-Sport)
Urban Short Stay accommodation
Videosonics Cinema Sound re-recording
Wavendcommunications communications equipment (as Wavend Communications)
Whitehouse & Co legal and business affairs
Works, The international sales

Distribution:
Canada (Toronto Film Festival)
Italy (Rome Film Fest)
UK (London Film Festival)
Germany (Berlin International Film Festival)
UK
USA
Finland (Midnight Sun Film Festival)
Czech Republic (Karlovy Vary Film Festival)
France (Paris Cinéma)
Sweden (Lilla Filmfestivalen i Båstad)
Australia
Denmark
Sweden
Norway
France
Iceland
Germany
France (Festival du film d'éducation - Evreux)
Taiwan (Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival)
Spain
Finland
Belgium
Hungary (Titanic International Filmpresence Festival)
Greece (Athens)
Netherlands (Amsterdam)
Denmark (BUSTER Copenhagen International Film Festival for Children and Youth)
Japan

Distributors:
IFC Films (2007) (USA) (theatrical)
IFC First Take (2007) (USA) (theatrical)
Iae (2009) (Japan) (theatrical)
King Record Co. (2009) (Japan) (theatrical)
Madman Entertainment (2007) (Australia) (all media)
NetFlix (2007) (USA) (DVD)
NonStop Entertainment (2007) (Sweden) (theatrical)
Optimum Releasing (2006) (UK) (theatrical)
Red Envelope Entertainment (2007) (USA) (DVD)

Review:
(UK reviewer) - Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian newspaper.
‘‘Shane Meadows continues his fast and fluent film-making career with this quasi-autobiographical picture about skinheads: a movie with hints of Alan Clarke's Made in Britain and, in its final image, the haunted disenchantment of Truffaut's The 400 Blows. It is a sad, painful and sometimes funny story from the white working classes of 1980s Britain, the cannon-fodder caste alienated from Falklands rejoicing on the home front and not invited to participate in the nation's promised service-economy prosperity. Meadows boldly attempts to reclaim the skinhead from the traditional neo-Nazi image, explicitly distinguishing his characters from a separate racist influence, and presenting them as an anarchic youth tribe that idolised West Indian music. He sees their susceptibility to the extremist right as a poignant and even tragic part of their fatherless culture, literally and figuratively orphaned by the times.
There's a winning lead performance from 13-year-old newcomer Thomas Turgoose playing a put-upon lad called Shaun in the run-down Grimsby of 1983. His dad was a serviceman killed in the Falklands and he's perennially getting picked on for this, and for his horrible flared jeans which make him look, as one bully cruelly puts it, like Keith Chegwin's son. Sloping and moping his way home after a standard-issue school day of humiliation, Shaun gets waylaid by some skins in a dodgy underpass, but instead of yet more battering, the gang give him sympathy and understanding; they become Shaun's only friends, and with a new Ben Sherman shirt and number one cut, Shaun has new pride and a new identity.
The gang's leader is Woody - a cheerful, sparky performance from Joe Gilgun - and they have an African-Caribbean member facetiously nicknamed Milky, played by Meadows regular Andrew Shim; Shaun even finds romance with one of the group's girl-punk fellow travellers: a languid and rather elegant older woman called Smell (Rosamund Hanson) who earnestly explains to Shaun's mum that she is called that simply because it rhymes with Michelle. The idyll is soon destroyed with the highly unwelcome appearance of Combo, a ferocious and sinister skin warrior just out of prison, played by Stephen Graham. He demands the group join his National Front cell, and turn out for an NF meeting in a tatty pub, addressed by one of the movement's suit-wearing officer class, played in cameo by Frank Harper.
Turgoose is the picture's heart and soul, and it's a terrifically natural, easy and commanding performance. Turgoose's open face radiates charm, and then, when he goes over to the dark side of racism, a creepy, anti-cherubic scorn: almost like one of the little blond kids in Village of the Damned. But Meadows is always concerned to preserve a sympathetic core to Shaun, and in fact to all the skins. Even the deeply objectionable Combo is shown to be suffering from emotional pain.
Like Meadows' earlier pictures, Dead Man's Shoes and A Room for Romeo Brass, This Is England is about younger, vulnerable figures being taken under the wing of older, flawed men, and this personal theme here finds its richest and maturest expression yet. As to whether we should buy its implied leniency about skinhead culture: that is another question. The West Indian influence is advanced as proof that skins were not necessarily racist: yet it can't cancel out Combo's hate campaign against South Asians, the "Pakis" who "smell of curry", a campaign which goes quite unchallenged or even unremarked upon by any of the skins, good or bad.
The skinhead identity is, after all, obviously supposed to be more aggressive than that of other tribes: I remember as a 10-year-old cowering on the terraces of Watford football club in the early 70s, as the Luton boot boys got stuck in, and my father grimly telling me that the reason they shaved their heads that way was so the coppers couldn't grab them by the hair. Whether or not that is true, it certainly made the wearer's head look like a big, third clenched fist. And it's still difficult to get a handle on them.
Meadows appears to want to find emotional truths behind the bravado, to find reasons for the male rage. It's a valid quest, and there are telling and touching moments, particularly between Turgoose and Rosamund Hanson. I found myself wishing that their love story could occupy more of the film, maybe for the same reason that the Shane Meadows film I have enjoyed most is the one his real fans loathe: the comedy Once Upon a Time in the Midlands. But from the get-go of this drama, it is obvious that things are heading only one way: towards a climactic flourish of violence, and it's a glum business wondering to whom and from whom this is going to happen. This is a violent subject, and these are violent people, and yet I couldn't help feeling that Meadows is, as so often, more comfortable with machismo than with the humour and gentleness which play a smaller, yet intensely welcome part of his movies. However agnostic I confess to still feeling about his work, there's no doubt that Meadows is a real film-maker with a growing and evolving career, and with his own natural cinematic language. When I think of his films, I think, for good or ill: this is English cinema.’’
(USA reviewer) Manohla Dargis from the New York Times.
‘‘A soulful blast from the past sparked by heart and a throbbing beat, “This Is England” returns us to 1983, when Ronnie and Maggie ruled their roosts with Teflon finesse and an iron grip. The place is a quiet town where rude graffiti litter the walls and teenage skinheads loiter, dressed in jeans, Ben Sherman shirts and Doc Martens boots, looking for something, anything, to do. The Falklands War has just ended, but another battle simmers on the home front, fuelled by unemployment, rage, nationalism and the old ennui. modest, near-flawless gem, “This Is England” is the fifth feature by the young British director Shane Meadows, doing his best work since he first hit the festival scene in the mid-1990s with his hilarious, raw-hewn shorts “Small Time” and “Where’s the Money, Ronnie?” Like most of his films the new one takes place in the East Midlands, in England’s midsection, where Nottingham and Derby are, and where Mr. Meadows was born and, in early adolescence, became a skinhead. By turns gentle and brutal, “This Is England” is a humbly, if insistently political, autobiographical homage to that lost world of youth as well as a lament for its hopes, pleasures and passionate camaraderie.
As if returning to basics Mr. Meadows has, for this film, smartly departed from his reliance on familiar faces, some of whom have at times weighed heavily on his past work (Bob Hoskins in “Twentyfourseven,” Paddy Considine in “Dead Man’s Shoes”). The wonderful newcomer Thomas Turgoose gets most of the attention here, as 12-year-old Shaun, a spark plug with a lopsided stare, who lives with his mother and keeps his own counsel. Quick to anger, fast with his fists, Shaun plows through town like a tugboat, cutting a poignant, lonely swath through strangers and schoolmates alike until he’s affably taken off course by Woody (Joe Gilgun), a garrulous skinhead with pipe-cleaner legs and a small cross tattooed in the middle of his forehead.
In both its politicized long view and in its more important close-up story, “This Is England” is about the joy that can come with finding your tribe, of discovering and being accepted by those with whom you can find and be yourself. When Woody brings Shaun into his band of skinhead brothers, the boy lifts like a balloon. He giggles and smiles, and the hole that had recently torn through him, caused by the death of his father, starts to mend. Not long after Shaun laces up his boots and says goodbye to his long hair, Mr. Meadows shows him strolling about with his new friends in slow motion, their similar yet different forms shifting and moving harmoniously, flowing like tributaries toward a single destination.
There’s a boisterous honesty as well as a real edge to the friendship among the skinheads, who sometimes combust in giddy anarchy, as when they run riot with hammers through some abandoned apartments. Mostly out of work and at loose ends, they sit around idling and revving. As the pitch- and tone-perfect soundtrack pulses with Toots and the Maytals, the Specials and Ian Dury, they drink and smoke to excess, crowding into already cramped homes and bleak cafes, tossing insults at one another as both time and their youth seem to stand still. They have made their own world, but one with its own perils, notably Combo (Stephen Graham, brilliant and scarily real), who mucks up this idyll with spit and racist invective.
Mr. Meadows’s sentimentalism has sometimes gotten the better of his work, with tears and needlessly punishing violence, but not here. Shaun may embody pitifully hard times and bad breaks, but Mr. Meadows refuses to let him off the hook. In the film’s brilliant opening sequence — with its images of the Falklands War abroad set against anti-Pakistani violence at home — Mr. Meadows sketches out his interests and ethics with clarity and precision. Throughout the drama and heavy-hearted tragedy that follow he continues to bridge the personal with the political and revel in brotherhood while also warning of its dangers. He reclaims the best of these skinheads and their often-despised subculture, celebrating the finest in young men and women who were once united not under the Union Jack but under a groove.’’

User Comments and ratings:
‘This really is the most important British film for years, dealing skilfully with tensions around nation, belonging and masculinity. It feels entirely convincing and deftly moves between comedy, pathos and menacing violence. The occasional clichés can be forgiven (guess what? The flag wavers are all sinister psychos!) because this film is clearly the work of someone who lived this time and place. A lesser director would have lapsed into stereotyping the gang as knuckle-dragging nasties but Meadows' portrayal is hallmarked by humanity and sympathy. The recurring Falklands War footage seeks to remind us (at least those of us who lived through this period) of the slightly crazed jingoism that swept Britain at that time. This film's stature will only grow over time.’ 10/10

‘This movie was a throw back to more then the 80's. It's a reflection on a part of society that should no longer exist. Another national front type movie, more skin heads, more dilapidated council estates where these people tend to thrive (according to the movie producers) and the parts when Sean is snogging an 18 year old woman is just wrong. 18 year old woman getting it on with a 12 year old boy!!!! You could tell that the token black character was going to get seven bells kicked out of him in the end; it was just a matter of when and not if. It's not gritty, it's not on the edge, it's not powerful as some critics would have you believe. It's actually pointless, mindless, and stupid! The main skinhead uses the fact the immigrants are taking all the jobs as an excuse to attack them as there are no jobs left for the working man. I would point to the fact that he had a criminal record, and tattoos on his face would be more of a disadvantage.’ 1/10

Movie Connection:
Awards: 2008 Won
BAFTA Film Award: Best British Film - Mark Herbert and Shane Meadows
Mons International Festival of Love Films: Best European Film - Shane Meadows
Mons International Festival of Love Films: Young European Jury Award - Shane Meadows
2008 Nominated
BAFTA Film Award: Best Original Screenplay - Shane Meadows
UK Empire Awards: Best British Film
UK Empire Awards: Best Newcomer - Thomas Turgoose
Golden Trailer Awards: Best Independent Poster (for the quad poster).
London Critics Circle Film Awards: ALFS Award British Breakthrough (Acting) - Thomas Turgoose
London Critics Circle Film Awards: British Director of the Year - Shane Meadows
London Critics Circle Film Awards: British Film of the Year
2007 Won
Gijón International Film Festival: Young Audience Award ("Enfants Terribles") - Shane Meadows
Newport International Film Festival: Best Director Award - Shane Meadows
2007 Nominated
Bangkok International Film Festival: Golden Kinnaree Award Best Film - Shane Meadows
Flanders International Film Festival: Grand Prix
2006 Won
British Independent Film Awards: Best British Independent Film
British Independent Film Awards: Most Promising Newcomer (On Screen) - Thomas Turgoose
London Film Festival: UK Film Talent Award - Mark Herbert
2006 Nominated
British Independent Film Award: Best Director - Shane Meadows
British Independent Film Award: Best Screenplay - Shane Meadows
British Independent Film Award: Best Supporting Actor/Actress - Joseph Gilgun
British Independent Film Award: Best Supporting Actor/Actress - Stephen Graham
British Independent Film Award: Best Technical Achievement - Ludovico Einaudi (original music)

Other films made by Shane Meadows:
King of the Gypsies (1995) (10mins)
Small Time (1996) (60mins)
Where's the Money, Ronnie? (1996) (12mins)
Twenty Four Seven (1997) (96mins)
A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) (90mins)
Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002) (104mins)
Dead Man's Shoes (2004) (90mins) Northern Soul (2004) (30mins)
The Stairwell (2005) (15 seconds)
This Is England (2006) (100mins)
Somers Town (2008) (75mins)

Outlets/Exhibition:
Canada (Toronto Film Festival)
Italy (Rome Film Fest)
UK (London Film Festival)
Germany (Berlin International Film Festival)
UK
USA
Finland (Midnight Sun Film Festival)
Czech Republic (Karlovy Vary Film Festival)
France (Paris Cinéma)
Sweden (Lilla Filmfestivalen i Båstad)
Australia
Denmark
Sweden
Norway
France
Iceland
Germany
France (Festival du film d'éducation - Evreux)
Taiwan (Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival)
Spain
Finland
Belgium
Hungary (Titanic International Filmpresence Festival)
Greece (Athens)
Netherlands (Amsterdam)
Denmark (BUSTER Copenhagen International Film Festival for Children and Youth)
Japan