FLICK When we first see Jackie (played by Kate Dickie in an intensely engaging performance), she is working, sitting in front of a wall of monitors looking out over Red Road, a high rise apartment complex in a run-down part of Glasgow. Though she is doing her job as a surveillance operative, watching the moves of the residents in a small rundown town, it's as if she is also keenly searching for something or someone. Almost like a God's-eye view, she sees the comings and goings of everyone. When she targets Clyde, and insinuates herself into his life, we don't immediately know her movitvation (can it be purely sexual attraction?) which is what keeps us glued to her every move in this powerful drama that is set up as a thriller and reveals much more. (UK, Denmark) Screened at the 2007 Philadelphia Film Festival where it won the Archie Award for Best First-Time Director. My Score: 9.5 out of 10.
From the NY Times: (Director Andrea) Arnold walked off with the jury prize at Cannes and has since won an award at the BAFTAs...for special achievement in a first feature...Though Ms. Arnold wrote her won screenplay, she was given all of her major characters beforehand. "Red Road" is part of a Scottish-Danish initiative called Advance Party, which is an offshoot of Dogma 95, the film movement started by Lars von Trier and three other Danish direcotrs as an attempt to restore authenticity to filmmaking by establishing rules for directors to follow...Advance Party would consist of three low-budget films by three novice directors, each one shot digitally in Scotland in six weeks. The catch? All three films would feature the same group of characters (provided to the directors in a bare-bones outline) and be played by the same actors. Each director would then create a story, and the characters would change and be fleshed out from film to film...Ms. Arnold said "the trick was to try to make these characters my own. So I went off and wrote a lot of my own things about them, filling in gaps about who I though they were." For instance, Jackie, who was described in the outline as a "bit aloof and cool," has to be aloof and cool in all three films, but it was Ms. Arnold's decision to make her a closed circuit television operator, and this occupation can change in the next two films. The producers of Advance Party chose Ms. Arnold after viewing her short films....
FLICK When we first see Jackie (played by Kate Dickie in an intensely engaging performance), she is working, sitting in front of a wall of monitors looking out over Red Road, a high rise apartment complex in a run-down part of Glasgow. Though she is doing her job as a surveillance operative, watching the moves of the residents in a small rundown town, it's as if she is also keenly searching for something or someone. Almost like a God's-eye view, she sees the comings and goings of everyone. When she targets Clyde, and insinuates herself into his life, we don't immediately know her movitvation (can it be purely sexual attraction?) which is what keeps us glued to her every move in this powerful drama that is set up as a thriller and reveals much more. (UK, Denmark) Screened at the 2007 Philadelphia Film Festival where it won the Archie Award for Best First-Time Director. My Score: 9.5 out of 10. 
