Director: John Hardwick
Year: 2005
Country: UK
Language: English
Length: 83 mins
Format: PAL

Synopsis

33 X Around The Sun is a film based loosely on the myth of Orpheus and Euridice. It follows the story of a man who wakes up one night in an apparently abandoned hospital and leaves to go in search of his home.

The journey takes place on the nocturnal streets of an unamed city where our hero meets a series of increasingly unusual characters. He encounters an insomniac dancer, a cafe ranter, a dog with a plan, a pair of cops from different dimension, and a jaded film crew that keeps disappearing.

These characters push and pull our hero in different directions with their conflicting demands and he struggles to piece together a true picture of what is happening around him. His dreamlike journey only concludes when the various strands of the story come together and our hero is finallyallowed to reach his destination.

As you can probably tell, this film is magnificently out of step with current trends in British Cinema. This is partially the result of it taking a rather unorthodox route into being.

It was initially financed with a small arts grant intended to facilitate the production of a 15 minute short. However, the resulting forty-minute film seemed to suggest a bigger story. After consulting with the cast and crew it was decided that the film should be allowed to develop. The producer and director gathered together their own money, the cast and crew reunited, and the rest of the film was shot.

The total number of shooting days, although spread over three years, came to a mere fourteen for the enire production. The film is now eighty three minutes long and, all told, has cost a whopping £28,000.

The film was finally completed in June 2005. It was made, inch by inch, over a total period of four years by a talented, multinational cast and crew, most of whom donated their considerable abilities for free.

33 X Around The Sun is a difficult film to categorise. It is a woozy, surreal picaresque that has a flavour all of its own. The films it most closely resembles are perhaps the enigmatic fables of Raoul Ruiz or Jacques Rivette, through comparisons such as this have a tendency to mislead.
John Hardwick