User:Mant a tangi/Hurricane Films

Hurricane Films is a film production company based in Liverpool, England. It has produced both documentaries and fiction films at both short and feature length. It is best known for Terence Davies' feature-length documentary Of Time and the City (2008).

History
The company was founded in the year 2000 by Solon Papadopoulos, a marine engineer turned filmmaker, and Roy Boulter, the former drummer for pop group The Farm.

In the early 2000s it made several short films, often films with relevance to social problems or the local area, or films with a twisted take on popular culture. These shorts included Comm-Raid on the Potemkin (2000), a re-interpretation of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin shot in the style of a video game; Wrecked (2000), a about a drunken journey home in Liverpool city centre; Gutwallops (2000), a surreal tale of family violence by the Irish director Enda Hughes; and I’m A Juvenile Delinquent, Jail Me! (2004), a satire of reality television and its exploitation and sensationalising of youth culture, directed by Alex Cox.

Under the Mud
In 2004, Hurricane Films began work on a community-based writing project that would become a feature film. Papadopoulos and Boulter visited the economically depressed local area of Garston and enlisted a group of fifteen teenagers with no previous experience in screenwriting to share their experiences and create a film script.

The resulting film, Under the Mud, was made for less than £100,000. Described as “social surrealism” by the producers, the film is a comedy-drama following one day in the life of a Garston family on the day of its youngest daughter’s first Holy Communion, as family tensions erupt and the children go missing. It contains various fantasy sequences, as well as moments of drama alternated with slapstick comedy.

Under the Mud played at several international film festivals in 2006 including the Hollywood Film Festival, Victoria Film Festival and Cambridge Film Festival. It did not receive theatrical distribution, but was released on DVD in 2009.

Of Time and the City
In 2008, as part of Liverpool's Capital of Culture celebrations, Hurricane was awarded a £500,000 Heritage Lottery Fund grant to produce a project of local importance. The company teamed with Terence Davies to make Of Time and the City, a chronicle of Davies' own life as a Liverpool youth and a personal reminiscence on his alienation from society and love-hate relationship with the local area. Narrated by Davies himself, the film showcases masses of archive footage chronicling the evolution of Merseyside over the course of the 20th Century, and features poetry excerpts from such authors as T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson, as well as a classical music soundtrack comprised of works from composers such as Mahler and Sibelius.

Of Time and the City was shown In Competition at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival where it won heavy critical acclaim, and it continued to receive accolades as it expanded into international release. It was named the best film of 2008 by BBC film critic Mark Kermode, won the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Nonfiction Film of 2009, and Papadopoulos and Boulter were nominated for a 2008 BAFTA Award as "Most Promising Newcomers."