In early November 2019, a short film, “Gripped”, goes into production in the North Yorkshire area that aims to present the realities of living with Alien Hand Syndrome. Alien Hand Syndrome is a rare brain condition that leaves the sufferer without the conscious control over their hand, and the feeling that something alien has control over it. It is a condition that came into the public eye through Stanley Kubrick’s iconic 1964 film “Dr Strangelove”. In the film, the eponymous Dr Stranglelove has Alien Hand Syndrome and cannot stop his Alien Hand from doing the Nazi salute.
Peter Sellers in Dr Strangelove
“Gripped" focuses on a young painter, Cassie, who must learn to live with the daily challenges of Alien Hand Syndrome and the mark it leaves on her as an individual. Cassie is working towards her final year exhibition at a respected art school, but she can’t find what she wants to say. There is a disconnect between her ability as an artist and the ideas she wishes to express, that are leading her to think that she has made the wrong life choice. That she should have become something else. The importance of this final year exhibition is being amplified by everyone she knows: from her head lecturer, Roahl, to her boyfriend and fellow art student, Theo, and finally her mum, Imogen. To the point where it is the only thing on her mind, but it shouldn’t be. Cassie is an epileptic who needs to take pills to manage her seizures, but as the pressure of the exhibition rises she neglects her medication and is putting herself at risk of an epileptic fit. One day at art school the combination of the feeling of personal inferiority, external pressure, and medical imbalance fulcrum to result in a particularly severe epileptic fit. Cassie regains consciousness from the epileptic fir to find herself in her bedroom at home with her left hand holding her neck firmly with bloodied finger nails. She tries to will her hand off her throat but realises that she can’t control it, and so loosens the left hand’s grip with her right. She has developed Alien Hand Syndrome, and the hand that she has lost control over is the hand that she uses to paint. But this hand continues to paint, and in a way that she could only dream of! Her Alien Hand is confident and bold. Decisive and brave. It is the artist that she was meant to be, but this extraordinary talent comes with a cost.
Director Joseph Simmons had this to say about the film: “Although this film aims to present an accurate, but compelling, presentation of a complex mental disorder, but it also strives to talk about more universal themes. We have all experienced the feeling of losing our sense of identity and know what it means to feel our life is out of our control, and Gripped hopes to speak to these feelings in each of us.”
With top talent like Keeley Forsyth (Happy Valley, Guardians of the Galaxy), Corin Silva (Emmerdale, Dark Ditties) and Mensah Bediako (Eastenders, His Wake), and led by Iona Champian (Dark Rooms) the film looks set to impress with powerful performances all round.The film shoots in the North Yorkshire town of Harrogate from the 4th-8th of November and will work with local higher education institution Harrogate College to create an authentic art school world and a regional feel for the film. Gripped's proposed completion date is the end of 2019 with the aim of distributing the film to top tier film festivals globally in 2020.
https://i.redd.it/4rif9oqdcgu31.jpg
Check out the kickstarter page to get involved today:
Submitted October 24, 2019 at 11:46AM by joe_simmons2 https://ift.tt/2W7RFgv
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