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Interview 'Where is the justice?'

That's the question posed by MARK GILLIS in his film depicting the harsh realities of working-class life in one of the richest cities in the world. He tells John Green why he's asking it

SET in south-east London, Mark Gillis’s debut feature-length film Sink tells the story of skilled manual worker Micky Mason who, after losing his job, is forced to work zero-hour jobs before being made unemployed again.

 

Faced with a seemingly hopeless situation, he descends into drug-running to survive. It's a course of action completely out of character but the only way he can see of keeping his family together.

 

A bleak scenario, but all too real for thousands of working families in Britain today. Sink is all about surviving yet it’s not all anguish and despair. There are also warm and tender moments and doses of humour in what's a sensitive portrait of masculinity and three generations of men dealing with the loss of agency over their lives. It's about people trying to find their way through.

 

The cast of first-class but largely little-known actors, armed with tight, gritty dialogue written by Gillis, win us over immediately. Superbly shot by Simon Archer, Sink is a welcome addition to the British social-realist tradition.

 

Gillis's background is unconventional for a film-maker — comprehensive school in Hayes, biochemistry degree at Kent University, then touring as part of a comedy act trio. It gave him the opportunity to share his passion for science, the mysteries of the genetic code and the secrets of the atom. But, while fascinated by science, he was also drawn to theatre at school and university and he doesn’t see any contradiction between an interest in science and making films.

 

The trigger for taking up film-making, he tells me, may have been a trip to Los Angeles to appear in a play. Already a successful and experienced theatre actor, including at the RSC, he'd honed his skills as a scriptwriter with work for radio and theatre but realised while in LA how everything seemed to revolve around film. He sensed it might be an interesting medium to work in.

 

“I wanted to write about something that made me angry,” Mark tells me when I ask what inspired the subject-matter of Sink. “Every day I can look out from my friends’ flats on a nearby estate in Brockley and see the dominating skyline of Canary Wharf and I think how those people there were responsible for the horrendous banking crash in 2007-8 but haven’t had to face retribution.

 

“Yet the people I live among had their lives devastated by that crash and the imposition of austerity, making them foot the bill — the bankers got off scot-free. That infuriated me and I wanted to write a script about that situation, about that huge fraud. Where is the justice in that?”

 

He also wanted to show how three generations of a working-class family have been affected and how our relationship to work has changed rapidly over such a short period. The grandfather in the film, now in need of care, had a skilled job for life and his son Micky had one too.

 

But those jobs went with deindustrialisation and he now has to hop from one zero-hours job to the next while his son Sam has no hope of finding a steady job at all, escaping into the half-life of a junkie.

 

As someone who comes from a working-class background himself, Gillis was also determined to portray working people as multifaceted characters and not the “other,” looked at from the outside, swearing and screaming at each other. The characters in Sink talk to each other kindly and politely, demonstrating genuine solidarity. They are real people, not caricatures.

 

“I’m horrified,” Gillis says, “that the destruction of traditional working-class communities and loss of steady work has had a devastating impact on them and now many feel a loss of self-esteem which having a job gives, many have lost confidence in themselves.” But there is still solidarity to be found in these communities, as the film demonstrates very movingly, enabling people to find their way, despite the hardship.

 

Gillis doesn’t give us the expected ending with the scream of police sirens and Micky's arrest. He knows he’s doing wrong and suffers under the moral ambiguity of his life now, but, in the final shot of the film, he stands on the balcony of his flat, looks over at the huge skyscraper fortress of Canary Wharf and simply gives a short, bitter laugh.

 

Over the final credits we hear Oliver Hoare singing the inspiring lyrics, “No power can pull us down.”

 

The narrative has a strong resemblance to Ken Loach’s film I, Daniel Blake and Gillis smiles wryly when I ask if he was influenced in any way by it. Modestly, he reveals that he'd finished shooting his film two years before Loach’s film was released, but post-production work delayed its release for another two years. That’s the problem with filming on a shoestring, he says.

 

One of his previous scripts was taken up by the UK Film Council, now BFI, and looked like being given the green light several times, but it never happened. “A couple of experiences like that were enough to make me feel I wanted to make Sink whatever, so we raised the finances ourselves rather that go through the normal channels.” When actor Mark Rylance saw the finished cut he was so impressed that he became an associate producer, which should help boost the film’s chances.

 

The budget was raised through crowd-funding, investments from the film-makers themselves and other small investors, with everyone on the project agreeing to work for deferred fees and profit share.

 

The film goes on general release from October 12, but preview screenings at Labour Party branches and feedback afterwards have shown that the film hits its target. Audiences appreciate this wry, unadorned and prescient perspective on working-class lives in modern Britain.

 

It provides much food for thought about injustice and whether we want to live under the sort of system that destroys people’s lives in this way. And it's also a touching portrait of working-class masculinity in an era of biting austerity.

 

It's a highly promising debut for Gillis, who's most certainly a director to watch out for in the future.

 

 

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