Written & Directed by Liam Pinheiro-Rogers
PRODUCED BY Cyrus Mirzashafa AND Levon Gharibian
In the urban streets of London, the stories of would-be knife crime victims are connected by a wandering drifter who has loose ends to tie.
ABOUT THE FILM
LONDON’S FORGOTTEN screened at our BIFA Qualifying Kino Short Film Festival earlier this year. Other notable festival selections include Shorts On Tap, The British Urban Film Festival, Leeds International Film Festival, and Liverpool Film Festival. It won Best Experimental Short at The South London Film Festival and was nominated for Best Director at The British Short Film Awards. It recently premiered on Director’s Notes.
ABOUT THE FILMmakers
Liam Pinheiro-Rogers is the Writer/Director of London’s Forgotten. Since leaving film school in 2015, he has been making independent short films, with genres ranging from horrors to sci-fi to dramas. He built up a portfolio as a director of short films and music videos, while screenwriting short and feature films. One of his feature screenplays, “A Flood To Remember” won Second Rounder at the Austin Film Festival. Recently on the directors front, he has worked with clients such as musicians May Roze and Alex Ko, and the charity Missing People.
READ OUR INTERVIEW WITH LIAM
Welcome to our Short of the Week series. Tell us a bit about yourself and your filmmaking background.
So I was always very creative growing up, doing lots of drawings and coming up with all sorts of ideas for different concepts but never really knowing what exactly I wanted to do. Be a drawing artist? Novel writer? Comics? Videogames? I explored all of these different thoughts but nothing stuck. At 13 years old, I got to do a short (and terrible) film in my secondary school and it was there I realised I wanted to be a filmmaker. I wanted to write and direct specifically. From there, I went to film school to learn a bit more about the craft and after leaving, I started making a lot of self funded short films, producing most of them and building relationships, and really cutting my teeth making dramas, horrors, science fiction stories and so on until I found my voice. I always saw films as the best way for me to articulate different thoughts and ideas within my favourite genres and types of films.
Tell us about the genesis of London's Forgotten and your motivation for making this film.
London's Forgotten had a long journey from the concept to the finish line. I thought up the concept back in 2019, inspired by growing up in Tottenham and knowing people who were involved in gang activities. I lived in Tottenham for a good portion of my early life. It was when I went to secondary school where I realised what was going on in my area in terms of the gang lifestyle, and knife and gun crime. The catalyst for my parents deciding to get us out was our next door neighbour's son being shot in a neighbouring area to Tottenham. I wanted to use these facts, about the why and how questions about knife crime victims, to create a story about knife crime and my love of surrealism and horror played into that too. It was going to be a no budget thing shot on the weekend with a skeleton crew about a guy who finds his dead body in an alleyway. But the shoot was cancelled, which was a blessing in disguise. I went back to the drawing board and a montage kept popping in my head of knife crime victims, so I decided to combine that idea with my old idea to create something fresh and unique. Throughout the year, I met people who would eventually become members of the crew. We were going to shoot in April 2020 only for COVID to stop us. This gave me time to go over the script and make changes, which was a secondary blessing in disguise funnily enough! It was over a year later, in 2021, that we finally managed to successfully crowdfund London's Forgotten and shoot the film.
What were some of the main obstacles you experienced when making London's Forgotten and how did you overcome them?
We were battling up against a few issues doing the shoot for sure. One that really sticks to mind was having to recast an important character the night before the shoot. As we were shooting during COVID in 2021, one of our cast members unfortunately caught it a day before the shoot. Luckily, I kept my composure and the night before, I ran through different actors that could suit the role and managed to find the perfect fit for the character.
Tell us about the journey of getting your film to audiences and some of the festival circuit highlights.
We had our premiere in the Peckhamplex in October 2022 where we screened our film to not just the cast and crew but also those that are part of the community, charities and those who contributed to our crowdfund campaign. After that, we got good news after good news with various festivals. We managed to get into a decent amount at the end of the day. Highlights include meeting some great likeminded filmmakers at the Leeds International Film Festival and seeing some great horror shorts there. The South London Film Festival was another highlight as it unexpectedly snowed heavily that night! At the end of the day, every festival was great as I got to see some awesome films and meet some talented people.
What advice or hacks would you give to other short filmmakers?
I think that it is great to be ambitious and you should have a lot of ambition when it comes to making your short film but be realistic and know your limitations. I see too many short films that are very clunky and rushed because they tried to cram a lot of big budget aspects into it with a small budget. London's Forgotten was ambitious and had many locations but it's not something I'm expecting to get all the time, and we had a decent budget to go with that. Also, take time with the script. As stated above, it took a year until I truly understood what London's Forgotten was. Don't rush into things.
Any film recommendations that we should add to our watchlist?
Oh, well, I'll recommend some good ones that fit in with the style of London's Forgotten for sure. I would say David Lynch films, such as Eraserhead and Muholland Drive for the surrealism. The Exterminating Angel by Luis Buñuel is also a good shout equally for the surrealism as well as using it for social commentary. Bullet Boy if you're looking for a grounded urban London story.
What are you working on next?
A proof of concept social-horror short film called Scelus! (Scelus is Latin for "To commit a crime"). I'm currently looking to shoot Scelus sometime within the next six months after I secure funding, and I couldn't be more excited to share the story with the rest of the world! The short deals with Riley, a 24 year old ex-criminal on community service, who plans to use his gift of seeing the dead to confront an entity in a run-down council flat before his curfew begins. I'm hoping to develop this short film into a feature to expand the world further.
