If you’ve heard much at all about Bait, the breakthrough feature of British filmmaker Mark Jenkin, it’s likely concerned the anachronistic means by which he’s constructed the experimental drama. Shot on a hand-cranked Bolex camera in black-and-white 16mm, then hand-processed by Jenkin himself with an assortment of unusual materials that lend scratchiness to the images, the film offsets potential accusations of gimmickry in making these aesthetic choices relevant to evoking something specific about where it’s set, an unnamed fishing village in the county of Cornwall in southwest England. As writer Ian Mantgani describes in his review for Sight & Sound, the film “feels pounded into existence by hand, or possibly belched up the angry sea.”
Bait looks and plays like something unearthed from the depths of the British Film Institute’s archives that just so happens to feature contemporary fashion and vehicles, with the odd reference to the news of the day in the UK—a brief radio excerpt in one scene, that has a newsreader discuss Britain’s attempted departure from the European Union, has inevitably seen the film discussed under a broad banner of so-called “Brexit cinema.”
The film premiered at the Berlinale Forum and opens across the UK on 30 August, distributed by the BFI and screening from 35mm at select venues. Ahead of that release, Jenkin spoke in-depth to Filmmaker about the strict limitations he imposed upon himself, shooting on film and doing so for cheap, abstaining from using location sound, hand-processing, how the film plays overseas and why directors have a responsibility to experiment with the artform…
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