Cassie Allward
The documentary film-maker responds to criticisms made by our television reviewer, Robert Hanks, of her film 'Blokes', which was broadcast recently on BBC
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Your support makes all the difference.If the press is to be believed, the documentary film Blokes is an outrage, and I am the most dislikeable young woman in television (Robert Hanks, Television Review, 7 August).
If the press is to be believed, the documentary film Blokes is an outrage, and I am the most dislikeable young woman in television (Robert Hanks, Television Review, 7 August).
The film showed "egoism and disregard for other people's feelings". To judge by the energy and effort spent denouncing me, my one-woman campaign to corrupt the minds of the nation must have encountered some success.
A young female film-maker sets out to make a film about loyalty between two young blokes who say that a woman can never come between them. She fancies them; they fancy her; she is seduced by one of them and reluctantly becomes a character in her own film.
What was was described as a "self-conscious, self-indulgent and often repellently self-regarding film about Allward's relationship with the two men" was in fact an example of dead-pan irony about the subjectivity of documentary film-making. The film was about the current passion for voyeuristic documentary at all costs, as well as being a truthful and serious look at the fragility of friendship and how drab and awful casual relationships can be.
Chris and Jack, the subjects of the film, watched it, got it and liked it a lot. When you're trying to do something different, you can't expect everyone to understand, but it's sad to discover that most of the men whose curious job it is to watch the box are not able to see past their own preconceptions about the film-maker.
I have woken up to find myself hated, the subject of a campaign against the "crapumentary", with critics fantasising about how exactly they'd like to kill me. It's a funny feeling when you nail your flags loudly to the mast, only to discover that your critics are colour-blind.
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