Good Screenings

Heavy Load

Directed by Jerry Rothwell

• Audience Award BRITDOC Festival
• SXSW
• Broadcast Now Diversity Award

Synopsis

Heavy Load are Lewes' answer to the Ramones, a punk band subject to the usual inflammatory mix of ego, fantasy, and desire. They're also, uniquely, made up of musicians with and without learning disabilities.

About the director

Jerry Rothwell

After ten years making broadcast films about arts, mental health and education, Jerry Rothwell co-directed (with Louise Osmond) the documentary feature, "Deep Water" released theatrically in the UK by Pathe  and by IFC in the US. "Deep Water" won best feature documentary at the 2008 Rome Film Festival and a Grierson Award for best cinema documentary. Jerry is now in production on Donor 150, about a sperm donor meeting his children, and "The Town of Runners" about young Ethiopian athletes.

• "Heavy Load is an admirable documentary about a Sussex rock band. It's a deeply moving, totally unsentimental movie"
  - Philip French, Observer

• Official site
• Film guide to download

More Information

The bands' survival is a precarious negotiation between two different worlds: on the one hand the institutional timetable of day centres, work placements and social workers; on the other the chaotic slacker life of rehearsal rooms, studios and gigs. Home life and band-life; from invisibility to stardom of a sort and back again. But this is not a film about a young band on the road to making it. Specialising in thrash covers of late 70's punk - or punk versions of recent pop, Heavy Load are unlikely to have a top ten hit. "We like to take a classic song" says guitarist Mick, "and crucify it." Their cacophonic reinterpretation of Kylie's 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' possesses a frenzied anarchy that bears no resemblance to the disco original. Their howled version of the Troggs Wild Thing adds a psychotic menace that makes you forget that this was once a love song. On stage the band fizz with energy, attitude and sheer volume.

Shot over two years as the band record their first album and start a campaign to Stay Up Late, the film is a comedy of conflicting ambitions, as they move out of the ghetto of disability club nights to test whether their dreams can survive in the mainstream. 



Director Jerry Rothwell says "I hope that people will watch the film and – for a while at least - lose the preconceived frame through which the world tends to look at people with learning disabilities. In many ways Heavy Load are a band like any other, subject to the same mix of ego, fantasy and desire that fuels all great performances and the film is less about disability than about being human, finding your voice and the pleasure to be had from making a noise."

You can download the pack from the Stay Up Late campaign pack below - its aim is to help more people with learning difficulties to be able to have fun and party.

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