Sunday, April 7, 2013

DVD Release

DVD released in the UK on 18th March 2013

AWARDS

The film has received numerous International awards in 2012/13 - the 3 key ones are highlighted:

Won Best European Film at Berlinale
Won Best Cinematography at Sundance Film Festival
Won CBA Worldview Sundance Impact Award at Sundance London
Won Best Newcomer - Sally El Hosaini at BFI London Film Festival
Won Most Promising Newcomer - Sally El Hosaini at Evening Standard Film Awards
Won Grand Jury Award at LA Outfest
Won Audience Award - Annonay Film Festival, France
Won BIFA for Best Newcomer - James Floyd at British Independent Film Awards
Won Best Actor - James Floyd at Milan Film Festival
Won New Vision Award for Cinematography - Manaki Brothers Film Festival, Macedonia
Honorable Mention Outstanding First Feature, Frameline Film Festival
Nominated Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival
Nominated BIFA Douglas Hickox award for Best Debut Film - Sally El Hosaini at British Independent Film Awards
Nominated Sutherland Trophy (Best First Film) - Sally El Hosaini at BFI London Film Festival
Nominated Most Promising Newcomer - James Floyd at Evening Standard Film Awards
Nominated Best Newcomer - Fady Elsayed at BFI London Film Festival

UK Box Office Figures

Opening weekend: $44,833 (on 57 screens)
UK Box Office Total: $87,150

Source: Box Office Mojo

American Release

It had a tiny American relese - only 2 screens - but stil managed to take £10,305 in one weekend which is really good going!

BUDGET

When the A2 student went to see MBTD at the cinema, Sally El Hossani said that the budget was about £650, 000 and had been raised through private investors.

Sunday, December 2, 2012

The first box office figures have been published on Box Office Mojo.

It opened on 9th November in UK on 57 screens.
Opening weekend box office: $44,833
Gross Box Office over first 3 weeks: $85,376

That's pretty good for a low budget British movie. It will eventually make more money by the Long Tail; DVD, TV deals, PPV, Love Film etc.

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Cashtastic - is this synergy?

Cashtastic's Song 'I never give up' plays over the end credits. Great advertising for him - is he well known enough to promote MBTD? Lots of people in AS set 1 knew him and the song - and they are the target audience. He's on SBTV. You decide whether he's synergy or not!

Monday, November 19, 2012

Interview from The Guardian

My Brother the Devil director Sally El Hosaini: 'A lot of urban films have been laughed at' - video

Sally El Hosaini, director of My Brother the Devil, set in east London, tells Andrew Pulver how years of research on her own Hackney council estate made her film faithful to the real-life experiences of inner city teens, and describes the effect last year's riots had on the shooting of the film

Review from Little White Lies

BYDAVID JENKINS08/11/12 16:44

An extremely promising debut feature from Sally El Hosaini who dares to breath new life into the stock inner-city gang violence film.

An excited critical groundswell has accompanied the release of Sally El Hosaini's salty and sinuous urban potboiler, My Brother the Devil. And it's very easy to see why, as this assured and provocative debut feature is clearly made by someone with great technical aptitude and who would clearly not be content just peddling out another crass, moralistic youth movie.

Yet for all its early promise of innovation, it ends up a naggingly familiar chronicle of tit-for-tat East London gang violence which is all whisked up to its natural, blood-flecked boiling point.

The title alludes to James Floyd's Rash, a cheeky, polo-shirt sporting petty crim with Egyptian roots who is happy to toe the wideboy line, but only if his upstart younger brother, Mo (Fady Elsayed), does his best to keep his mitts clean. And even though the violence crescendos early in a thrilling territorial street scuffle with rival hood, Demon, it's not until much later in the film that the true nature of the title comes out.

Clearly indebted to Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 gang opus, La Haine, right down to the casting of French-Moroccan actor Saïd Taghmaoui who essentially reprises his role from that film, Hosaini has an admiral knack for teasing out fluid and naturalistic ensemble scenes, and she also has a great ear for poetic street vernacular. Her film carries with it a bracing authenticity.

It's a shame, then, that it sits firmly in the shadow of similar 'issues'-based genre offerings, notably Saul Dibb's Bullet Boy and Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank, the latter offering a genuinely subversive riff on the high-rise milieu.

The problem with the film is that Hosaini appears to have channelled all her energy into moulding Rash and Mo's characters, leaving the entire supporting cast to linger in the middle-distance as forgettable, single-note cyphers. And while the director deserves props for at least trying to deal with complex social issues and potentially combustible situations, one can't help but feel that The Big Reveal comes too late in the game for it to be dealt with in a particularly detailed or judicious manner.

It's feels more that Hosaini simply favoured a big narrative surprise instead of putting her money where her mouth was and starting the film at the point of the reveal – making the twist the subject of the film. The way in which the film is split so cleanly down the middle makes it difficult to deduce its thematic priorities.

Still, My Brother the Devil is a promising, intelligent and (from its dedication in the closing credits) highly personal piece of work, with the two lead actors bringing a hard-bitten charisma to their roles which makes it easier to sympathise with their fraught, anguished trials. Hosaini is very much one to watch.

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Arri Alexa Camera

This is the Arri Alexa Camera - the camera used to film My Brother the Devil (and also SKYFALL). it is a revolutionary new digital camera. (the basic starter kit costs £89,000 just for your info...... won't be buying one any time soon then).

Screen Daily - BUDGET INFO FOR MY BROTHER

This article is from the SCREEN DAILY website. It states the following information:

Budget £1million
Small independent film
taken to film festivals to attract distributors
created a BUZZ at Sundance

Rooks Nest takes off

15 February, 2012 | By Andreas Wiseman

Julia Godzinskaya and Michael Sackler of new UK production outfit Rooks Nest Entertainment come to Berlin with Panorama entry My Brother the Devil, Sally El Hosaini’s well-received debut which premiered at Sundance.

Rooks Nest produced the £1m-budgeted urban drama with Gayle Griffiths’ Wild Horses Film Company. Both came to the project after it was part of the Sundance Labs.

And the company’s first completed film is already creating a buzz, with sales outfit Pacha Pictures seeing strong interest from buyers, including US distributors.

Going forward, the fledgling UK company will develop, produce and provide equity backing for US and international projects with budgets up to $5m. Rooks Nest has already invested in Francesca Gregorini’s second feature Emanuel And The Truth About Fishes, starring Jessica Biel, Kaya Scodelario and Alfred Molina; Sundance lab drama Bluebird from Lance Edmands, and Sophie Fiennes’ documentary sequel The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology.

“We have a very clear business plan and budget range,” says Sackler, who also runs creative agency Hi Fly Nest, whose clients have included Adidas and Vivienne Westwood. “There was a start-up capital and we have used the money to get to scripts very quickly. We are self sufficient and quicker than some companies. While we are unlikely to fund a film entirely we will hedge our bets.”

Godzinskaya initially started out at as a trainee agent at WME in LA before working as an associate producer with James Wilson. Sackler was in the charity industry.

My Brother the Devil gets its festival premiere at the Friedrichstadt-Palast tonight [Feb 15] at 6pm.

Hackney Citizen Article

Another side of Hackney – My Brother the Devil

My Brother the Devil is no average portrayal of an East London council estate. The Hackney Citizen talks to the film’s director, Sally El Hosaini

Dominic Simpson
Friday 9 November 2012

Hackney-made: Sally El Hosaini’s new film, My Brother the Devil. Photograph: Etienne Bol

Set on a Homerton council estate, My Brother the Devil is a début film by Welsh-Egyptian director Sally El Hosaini that won a cinematography award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. And El Hosaini herself won the Best British Newcomer award at last month’s London Film Festival. Not bad for a first-time effort.

Tracing the relationship between two brothers of Egyptian descent, Rashid (James Floyd) and Mo (Fady Elsayed) who live in a cramped flat with their traditionally-minded parents, My Brother… takes many startling turns that transcend the average ‘social realism’ genre film.

El Hosaini, who has been a resident of Hackney for ten years, speaks in measured tones about her project. “It’s been six years making the film. I thought the film would be a micro-budget so I’d have to set it on the council estate where I live.”
The film’s intelligence, plot dynamics, and subtlety of characters lift it above similar portrayals of ‘gritty’ estates.

El Hosaini concurs: “A lot of the urban films that I see are phoney. Just because a film is set on an estate, it doesn’t have to be grim, depressing and one-dimensional. I wanted to show another side to Hackney – there are blue skies in the film.”

She admits that she was initially hesitant in her approach to the material: “when I first set out to write this film, I felt sort of like a fraud. But I really got into great lengths to know the people.”

For preparation before shooting started, “I hung out with the kind of boys that you see in the film…I got to know a lot of gangs. With James Floyd, he’s a middle-class kid from Finchley, but he spent five months immersed in the role, learning the language. And for Mo [Elsayed], he’s from Hackney and this was his first time acting.”

The authentic feel to the film extends to the fact that, according to El Hosaini, “ninety-five per cent of the film is set in Hackney. A lot of the cast and crew are from Hackney. A lot of the kids from the estate are actually in the film.”

Indeed, a rapport developed between the film crew and locals during shooting: “The whole community really embraced the film and allowed us to film there. They set up a cinema club with my producers after we’d left. The first screening was the film. They screened it in their community hall – that’s a regular thing now where they have monthly cinema nights. So that was a really nice thing to leave behind as a legacy.”

More surprising still is the presence of Saïd Taghmaoui, famous previously for his role in Mathieu Kassovitz’s seminal 1995 film La Haine, set on a housing project in one of Paris’ blighted banlieues. Taghmaoui’s appearance in My Brother… – as a Parisian of Arab origin transplanted to London, where he runs an upmarket photo studio – turns Rashid and Mo’s life upside-down, and leads to one of the film’s most surprising twists.

El Hosaini got to know the actor whilst working with him on the BBC series The House of Saddam. She admits that “I wrote that part for him, and I told him that I wanted him to be in this film. I loved La Haine and I wrote the character for him.”

El Hosaini – who grew up in the Egyptian capital Cairo but moved to her birthplace Wales when she was 16 – is effusive about her adopted borough: “Of all the places I’ve lived in London, I feel most at home in Hackney. I like the diversity of everything – shopping in the Turkish supermarkets with Middle-Eastern food. There’s just more colour in Hackney – it reminds me of Cairo, the sense of community.”

Yet she is ambivalent about the relentless gentrification of the area: “There are some estates near me that have been knocked down and turned into luxury flats. Hackney is changing – you just look at the skyline and all the cranes. There is new Hackney and old Hackney; there are these bubbles where people co-exist but never really intertwine.”

She is more upbeat when considering the impact that the film has had so far: “By the end of the year, it’ll have been received at forty film festivals around the world. It’s a 100 per cent indie film; we’re not backed by any huge bodies. Ultimately it’s a low-budget film, so it’s amazing how well we’re doing. A filmmaker hopes that they can connect to an audience. You just kind of make it hoping that people will relate to it.”

My Brother the Devil is on general release nationwide from today, Friday 9 November

Brixton Ritzy

Well, On Saturday 10th November I went to the 9pm showing of My Brother - and it was SOLD OUT! How I wish I'd booked a ticket. But I couldn't help being happy that it had clearly done so well.
So, I was wondering about how long it would be showing for. It looks like it's only on for 7 days at Brixton, 9th - 15th November inclusive.