The North Sea Riviera
Joshua Wedlake
GB
· 2013
· DVD
· 11 min
Festival 2013
'When we were young, we knew so little but felt so much. The ticket uncreased, the stub freshly torn, the days were crisp and our minds were unchained; oh, how good it was to love.'
'The North Sea Riviera' tells a tale of love, life and lunacy via an estranged odyssey through the digital uncanny. Set on, and off, the nostalgia-tainted East Coast of Britain in the latter half of the 20th Century, two deeply introspective and melancholic men battle with despair and heartbreak in a world full of drudgery and underachievement. While Tom, a grief-stricken teenager, struggles to come to terms with the passing of his youthful naivety, Jack, a disillusioned mariner, wakes up after years of near comatose employment captaining cruise ships which have ferried him along on autopilot through the autumn years of his life.
As the protagonists climb mountains of false hope, their paths cross coincidentally and their stories overlap and parallel each other in a bewildering tapestry of darkly comic vignettes. At times romantic and mournful, and elsewhere bizarre and eccentric, the burgeoning juggernaut presses relentlessly towards its nihilistic conclusion, ending the journey by raising as many new questions as have been settled along the way. In a world of grey skies, the small hours, rain, and amnesiac holidaymakers lost in a concrete jungle, we can only have hope: it might be warmer in the summer.
Animation MA graduation film produced at the Royal College of Art, London.