Mischief Night

Four years ago, Penny Woolcock attended the festival with no less than two feature films at the same time. This time she wrote and directed this cheeky, sparkling comedy with social and critical undertones – a kind of modern yet twisted Romeo & Juliet, in which love, religion, drugs, theft and magic go hand in hand.
The title refers to an old custom in the north of England to wreak havoc on one night in the year. The film concentrates on two families, the white lower-class family around Tina Crabtree – with her father Don, her daughter Kimberley and her sons Tyler and Macauley – and the Pakistani Khan family, of which Tina’s old flame Immie Khan forms part. Trouble ensues when Kimberley unexpectedly hears that her father is not dead after all. She goes out to investigate and comes across her contemporary Asif Khan. Things aren’t always easy in this multicultural district and when the two ethnic groups come into contact, things get out of hand…
This is not the first time that Tina Crabtree turns up in Woolcock’s oeuvre: she based two short television films on the same character. Just as for her television work, the film maker did a lot of research into the language and habits in the suburbs of Leeds and strives for a form of fiction that is deeply rooted in reality. Here too, the actors playing the lead are largely non-professional, recruited from the local community. (EH)

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