Country UK Running Time 98 mins Format DigiBeta Director/Producer/Screenplay Andy Spencer DoP Michael Bickerton Principal Cast Mark Shorey, Natalie West, Jo Wassell Print Source Top Flat, 180 Gravelly Lane, Erdington, Birmingham T 0121 384 7420
Contact for sales: Eric Schultz of Mind Your Head Productions email: eric@mindyourhead.org
Synopsis: Larry Bletch is an impoverished American artist inhabiting a vast studio of unfinished installations. Totally alone, Larry has developed a macabre penchant for tripping on pharmaceutical cocktails and nourishing his relationship with a seventy year old mannequin. He begins stalking a beautiful waitress who works nearby. Sara is an everyday office worker trapped in an unhappy relationship to an uncommunicative and uncaring chain-smoking husband. Following a car accident, she begins to experience psychic episodes in which she sees terrible glimpses of death and mutilation. Katrina is a beautiful Russian waitress working in a canal-side restaurant. She spends most of her time serving drunk or chauvinistic customers, and is intrigued by Larry's interest in her. When he asks her to sit for him she cannot refuse. As Larry's final project nears completion and Sara's gruesome visions intensify, all three characters are drawn into a twilight world where dream, reality and time collide. Bringing an unsettling, noirish edginess to a part of the country not known for it, Birmingham, Dark Eyes is fine example of DV potency. Where many are concentrating on cinéma vérité, here Andy Spencer manages to create something unreal and fantastical from the everyday. Visually striking, every shot is meticulously composed and lit. In a sparse script, conventional narrative is made to compete with processions of images that initially seem unconnected but serve to reflect the febrile states of each of characters. Mark Shorey's ravings as Larry recall Hopper at his diseased best, whilst ice-cool West almost fogs up the screen. Turn around, Bright Eyes, indeed. Andy Spencer attended WSCAD film school in the early '90s and was a finalist in the British Short Film Festival 1994 with The Lament of Stanley Clayton. After helming various corporate projects, he went on to make a number of shorts which were screened on the underground circuit. In 1999 his short Harriet screened at the Fantasy Film Festival. He went on to direct a film for Aids Awareness entitled The Harry Clinton Story.