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Jade-Marie Joseph wanted to show a positive side to urban youth culture with her film.

This film is Rated by the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Fresh team. Rated films are those the team or guest reviewers enjoyed, and feel are worth highlighting because of their production techniques. Reviews may contain spoilers.

Sharon Hepburn, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Fresh producer, says:

I rate this film because it is a snapshot of a particular group at a particular time and place. Jade-Marie has captured a very specific moment in the lives of her subjects, her friends. Courtney is celebrating his 2:1, Jamie has just set up a business, Amber is trying to turn her life around. They are all at the crossroads between youth and adulthood and they are realising where they are from, what they have been through and thinking about where they are going.

Their clothes, speech, accents, the music they're making and listening to, the words they use - all of this is very specific to the location and social setting and this is a crucial aspect of why I rate this film. Jade-Marie has taken her camera, for the first time as it happens, and documented what is around her. She's focused on a small group who are all on the cusp of massive changes in their lives and she is showing us how it is, now.

Although this is Jade’s first film and there is much that can be improved technically, she has got something essential for a documentary filmmaker: a strong sense of what her film is about and why she is making it. I know that sounds simplistic but actually it’s not at all simple or easy to achieve what she has achieved, especially with very little experience.

Jade-Marie is not a film student, she is a would-be actress working in a hairdressers’ and trying to get on to a drama course. What comes across from hearing Jade-Marie’s voice on the soundtrack, not just asking the questions but adding in her commentary, is that she has a strong sense of purpose, she really does want to show us how life is.

The film is also set within a context, London 2013, two years after the riots of summer 2011. So Jade-Marie and her friends are reacting to the way they perceive urban youth to be have been portrayed. She has taken us into her world and given us another angle on urban youth, her take on the world immediately around her and with which she is intimately involved. So we get an insider’s view, a story told from the inside.

It’s unmediated and that is what Fresh is all about, giving a voice to people like Jade-Marie who have something to say and the determination needed to say it through film.

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