Carefree Cornwall creative collaboration

Between September and December of 2023 Screen Cornwall worked with Carefree, a Cornish charity that works with young people with care experience. Recently, Cornwall has seen an increase of Separated Children Seeking Asylum who have travelled to Cornwall unaccompanied in search of safety. This project aimed to inspire a group of 16-18 year olds from different countries and backgrounds to engage their creative voices, tell their stories and experiences, work collaboratively in new ways and explore the magic of filmmaking.  

Over the course of 10 sessions, the young people developed an original film, A Quiet Place. The brief was to create a short film that can be shown to young people who are early in their journey in the UK and new to living in Cornwall as well as wider audiences. The group were keen to establish both the challenges and the advantages of living in Cornwall to give a rich view of their experience and communicate their truth.  

During the ideation development sessions, the group discussed topics from the representation of masculinity in social media to public transport and the difficulties of making new relationships in a foreign country. The conversations were hosted in a range of formats with fruitful contributions emerging from an interview carousel workshop in which the participants hosted their own interviews with one another.  

Each session was audio recorded and transcribed to create a long, verbatim script that they then cut by hand and arranged on a pinboard during a script editing session. Between workshops, the participants created footage on their phones documenting their daily lives to contribute to their final film. From the final version of their script, they developed plans for where and how they were going to shoot the film, breaking down the narrative into a shot list to make best use of their shoot day.  

After technical training in camera operation, lighting and sound recording, the participants shot their verbatim script in two locations over one day. The script brought together testimonials from the group as a whole and was reenacted by two of the participants. The other members formed the film crew, which consisted of two camera operators, a boom operator, two sound recordists and a director alternating roles throughout the day and supported by Carefree and Screen Cornwall staff.  

One of the participants was successful in their proposal to the BFI Film Academy Plus commission and will be developing their script into a short film with support from Screen Cornwall before March 2024.