Following its World Premiere in the International Competition at Sheffield DocFest in 2023, STEPHEN, a new, Liverpool-based feature film by artist Melanie Manchot, lands in UK cinemas this weekend, distributed by Modern Films.
STEPHEN is a hybrid narrative fiction/documentary, structured as a film-within-a-film. It is also presented as a multi-channel video installation, which featured as part of the 2023 Liverpool Biennial. The film’s theatrical release will be followed by a nationwide tour of the installation, launching at The Exchange in Cornwall on 4 May 2024, where it will exhibit until November before touring nationwide.
Scripted and shot cinematically as a fiction film, STEPHEN is shaped by the raw and moving energy of one young man’s quest to transform his early life of violence and addiction and of his desire to both act and live differently. The film is centred around Stephen Giddings who, growing up on the Quarry Green Estate in Kirkby, Liverpool, was confronted with addiction from an early age – both in the lives of those around him, and eventually in his own.
At just 26 years old he was giving up on life. What follows is an intimate journey as Stephen auditions for and takes on a role in a movie, questioning whether he can fulfil his ambitions and realise one of his big dreams: to become an actor.
The art gallery presentations include an installation of multiple CRT televisions introducing the characters, and the people who play them, through a series of monologues and auditions, before entering the cinematic screening of the feature length STEPHEN.
Combining original archive material, interviews and narrative drama, STEPHEN brings together a unique cast of four acclaimed British actors alongside a support cast drawn from a group of 20 participants in active addiction recovery.
Director Melanie Manchot began working with the Liverpool recovery group in December 2019, through a series of workshops and screen tests. All the members of the support cast have experience in front of and behind the camera. Some come with substantial skills as theatre or screen actors, yet all their lives have been marked deeply by periods of isolation and alienation caused by their experiences of substance and alcohol dependency.
At its core, STEPHEN shines a light on urgent social issues, exploring the UK’s fastest rising addiction, gambling. References to the first police crime reconstruction, filmed in Liverpool in 1901, are a reminder that addiction has long existed within the fabric of our culture.
Visually striking, STEPHEN is also about the process of filmmaking, about stories and staged realities, about the thin line between fact and fiction. It explores with unflinching honesty the complexities of desire, ambitions, hopes and dreams as well as the power of creativity as a motor for change.
Find out more at the Modern Films website.
