Noticias

Indiewire having encouraged us to reminisce about the 2000s through its recent Best of the Decade list, there’s the reminder of one key thread defining that era: the prominence of digital video and the prescient idea that it would alter filmmaking on all budget levels going forward. Still, films shot on standard-definition Dv, often with the tape format MiniDV, had one of the more inimitable aesthetics of this period; analogous to the revival of 4-track home recording in independent music, these works––from Dogme 95’s first wave to Jackass: The Movie––were tactile, immediate, and bathed in visual glitches, its grain artfully tarnishing the images rather than providing the implacable soul or character of the photochemical kind.

Across the pond, British independent filmmaking was never so wilfully art-damaged: the Y2K era was a commercially lucrative time, defined in the memory by fluffy period dramas and comedies, post-Trainspotting crime flicks,...

Richard Hunter’s feature “Foul Evil Deeds” is one of the more European of British first features, taking its inspiration from continental art house names rather than the more usual luminaries of U.K. social realism such as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh.

It consists of interwoven stories of everyday wickedness, from the careless to the horrific: “The influences are people like Ulrich Seidel and Michael Haneke being a huge one, Roy Andersson being a big one, and peripherally looking at all of those,” Hunter told Variety.

“The early Ruben Östlund as well. The Britishness, inherently, obviously comes out through me.”

Hunter arrived at filmmaking from advertising. “I did documentary at university, and that led into music videos, and from there into commercials. And there I found my wet place in that world. I looked to the people that had done that transition like Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham and Spike Jonze,...