Some families get more twisted with every branch, according to Jes Benstock. He's heading to the Edinburgh Film Festival with the documentary short, Orders of Love, a very personal project based on his family history. The film was made through the Film Council's Digital Shorts scheme, which partners agencies across the UK to produce more than 100 films every year. Films must be shot digitally, cost less than 拢10,000 and be less than 10 minutes in length.
How did you become a film maker?
I come from a background of comedy and theatre, and got interested in video and went off and learnt about that - I learnt about editing which seemed to be the main difference between theatre and film. Slowly over the years I have directed bits and pieces. I did pop promos for a while [including] a film which was a hybrid short film/pop video for Orbital called The Box, that got shown in the Edinburgh Festival a while ago, and some other short films. Over the past couple of years I've experimented with hybrids of music video and documentary. Orders of Love is a more conventional documentary, but mixed with this kind of music video sensibility - not afraid to use graphics, not afraid to use 3D animation to change the landscape of what you're watching.
It's about the hidden influences that past generations exert on our personalities. It looks at a type of therapy called family systems therapy, but it does it by looking at my family, my worries about my son growing up to possibly have the same kind of mental health problems that previous generations of my family have had and tries to find some answers as to where we get these kind of attributes.
It's a very personal subject, do you have any doubts about putting yourself up on screen like that?
No, I guess having been a comic for a while - a not very funny comic (laughs) - I've been through plenty of putting myself up there in difficult situations. That's not what I was worried about. It was difficult to get to some of the emotions in there, in the course of making the film, because they were a bit scary. I learnt about an uncle I never knew about really, and that becomes the centrepiece of the film. So the audience stumble with me on the journey, and it's a very fast journey because it鈥檚 only 10 minutes. So it's all kind of crammed in there.
Do you think it's difficult to get money to make short films?
There's an enormous amount of competition nowadays for funding. Although years ago, when there wasn't so much competition, I couldn't get funding (laughs) and now I seem to be able to, so I must be doing something right now that I wasn't then! But yes, it's very difficult to get funding because often people have levels of experience greater than certain funds or less than other funds [require], so you have to try to find the right place for your work to start with, to get on that train.
What are you going to follow this film up with?
I'm working on [a short] at the minute which is to be shot in Canada. It鈥檚 called Eternal Life, it's based on an old Yiddish story, but translated to modern-day Canada. Instead of a Jewish central character it's a western Buddhist, who鈥檚 on a quest for eternal life... I'd be happy to expand out [into longer films] but I have to prove myself more in the fiction world as well, I enjoy fiction as well as documentary, and so I'm developing a few bigger projects as well, some documentary, some fiction.
**Interview by Jen Foley.
