“Be On My Side”
On a planet where burnout is fatal, a desperate stranger meets a bookshop assistant just trying to survive.
Director Biography
Eden Igwe is a student director and writer. Born in Lagos before moving to London at an early age, confrontations between blackness and suburbia is one of many themes of Eden's short films and visual poems. Other concerns include finding creative and social liberation through adopting radical imagination, weaving connections between the obstructed histories of black women's cinema, and averting the gaze from isolating capitalist systems to global and local social ecologies. Eden studies English Literature at the University of St Andrews.
Director’s Statement
This film wouldn't exist without the events of 2020 onwards; the simultaneous phenomena of the global pandemic and my almost insatiable consumption of films where (black) women survive and live around catastrophe. I took inspiration from depictions of moral dilemma and persistence in the face of collapse by marginalised characters in alternative films such as Losing Ground by Kathleen Collins, Welcome II the Terrordome by Ngozi Onruwah, American Honey by Andrea Arnold, and, most crucially, Morvern Callar by Lynne Ramsay. I knew I wanted to make something which contained that air of philosophical questioning in a marginalised body while making ridiculous the very idea of cinematic marginality - calling to question what we live for, and how what we watch informs this.