2014 Angel Film Awards - Monaco International Film Festival angel awards

THE ANGEL FILM AWARDS HONORING SCREENPLAY WRITERS




IN OFFICIAL SELECTION ‘DIP’ WRITTEN BY LOU HAMILTON - SHORTLISTED FOR THE AFA

BIO:

Lou Hamilton is a multi-award winning director and screenwriter. She runs a company called Create Lab, which was established to make films that inspire positive change.

She studied photography and multi media at Byam Shaw School of Art, and film and photography for her MA at Chelsea College of art. She was awarded a Director’s Mentoring scheme under award-winning Director David Yates, then went on to make short artist films for public spaces, art galleries and cinema, funded by the Arts Council. Two of these were short listed for the David Altshul Award for innovative filmmaking. Lou co-wrote, directed and produced a documentary series on Terminal Illness for channel 4, which was nominated for the Royal Television Society Awards and the Broadcast Awards. This was followed by further documentaries for TV and Cinema exploring tough subject matter, and she now writes screenplays based on social issues whilst continuing to direct both drama and documentaries.

“DIP”
WRITTEN BY LOU HAMILTON

Based on the autobiography “Dip” & other works by Andrew and Polly Peters

Log Line:

Ex-Punk, ex-addict, Andrew’s addiction of choice is now Wild Swimming; but whilst trying to play ‘Happy Families’, his messy past comes back to haunt him.

Synopsis:

Writer and performance poet, Andrew Peters, is happily enjoying creative success and family life when his suppressed past starts to seep through the cracks. Ex-punk, ex-drug-addict, ex-alcoholic, he is on medication for depression but the mix is wrong and he starts to have visions of his dead brother who died in agony of Aids, with Andrew helpless to save him.

Even his beloved rivers and lakes of the majestic Welsh hills on the borders of where he lives, become places of dark threat and terror. He stops writing, stops wild swimming, stops performing. His wife Polly and two teenage children watch helplessly as he tumbles away from them. He takes to the living room sofa, as if it is a lifeboat in tumultuous waters.

But even the sofa starts to talk to him as his voice of conscience. There is no escape. He doesn’t want to die but he is too scared to live. He can’t see any other way out. It is his suicide attempt that galvanises his devoted wife into forcing the Mental Health Services to get him the help he needs.

Eventually the Consultant prescribes medication that is right for Andrew and he gets him the break-through therapy that allows him to accept the death by suicide of his father, when Andrew was just two years old. He realises that this was the source of his and his brother’s addictions, of their family inheritance of clinical depression.

He returns to swimming as his salvation, to the lakes, streams, ponds and rivers. It is the freezing waters that shock him back into the moment, give him the heroic sense of achievement, gratitude for his family, for his environment, and for his very existence.

But of course life’s challenges don’t stop. He has to face his son’s anger, his daughter’s departure to University, and his own ongoing fears of failure, loss and death. This time, however, he doesn’t look down the dark tunnel; he turns back towards life.

He re-finds his wife, his wild swimming and his sense of purpose and, armed with that, he makes the first strokes towards a brighter future.