Casting Shadows

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Drama on 4: Casting Shadows

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A light-hearted drama-documentary about the astonishing Brighton and Hove Film Pioneers.

A quirky, irreverent, light-hearted drama-documentary by Jonathan Holloway telling the remarkable story of the Brighton and Hove Film Pioneers who transformed cinema.

You might not believe it, but while Hollywood was still an anonymous LA suburb, one British seaside location was busy inventing the "language" of cinema and the first-ever commercial colour film system during a glorious decade from the late years of Queen Victoria's reign into the start of the 20th Century. 

That place was the twin towns of Brighton and Hove, and its role in helping found cinema as an art form is now recognised and lauded.

Casting Shadows is a quirky, light-hearted, fast-moving drama-documentary, celebrating the remarkable achievements of Brighton’s ‘pioneer filmmakers’.

Between the years 1895 and 1905, an extraordinary group of men and women created a remarkable body of work, had a significant influence on the development of cinema as we know it today, and invented many of the essential techniques of cinematic storytelling - and all over a decade before Hollywood launched itself in the 1910s, hugely influenced by the Brighton Pioneers. Their films and innovations transformed film making, and was a counterblast to the advent of cinema and ground-breaking cinematic achievements of the Lumière Brothers and George Méliès in France.

The principal characters are: the showman-filmmaker George Albert Smith; his actor-comedienne wife, Laura Bayley, Smith’s (unsung) co-director; his colleague-then-rival, the dour Scottish pharmacist-turned-filmmaker James Williamson; and the brash American hustler Charles Urban, the world’s first movie mogul whose arrival fatefully symbolised the ‘end game’. 

Cast: Karl Davies, Tom Cotcher, Jenny Funnell, Roger Alborough, Hilary Maclean, Madeline Hatt, Paul Bazely and Russell Floyd.
The narrator is the film historian, Frank Gray.

Sound Design: David Thomas.
Production Co-ordinators: Sarah Tombling and Sarah Wright.
Director: Andy Jordan

A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

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