HALFWAY to explore harsh realities of second chances

After winning ‘Best Student Short’ at the London Lift-Off Festival with his graduation film, DRIFT, Ben Caird’s FARMHAND depicted an idiosyncratic break in the monotonous life of a young farmer.  That too went on to win an award in the shape of ‘Short Film - Best Cinematography’ at the Downtown Film Festival Los Angeles in 2013.

Following on the back of these successes, Caird returns to the farmer’s life with his feature film directorial debut, HALFWAY.  The film, which utilises Caird’s trademark stimulating visuals, tells the story of a recently released convict who faces the conflict of enduring ties with his old criminal world while struggling to adapt to life on probation as the only black man in a conservative white farm town.  HALFWAY will seek to explore the harsh realities when someone actually is given a second chance in a new and unfamiliar surrounding, and bring to light the serious systematic failure within the American prison system, where a lack of opportunity for those who have transgressed in their past seems to guarantee a future behind bars. 

This surrounding is not wholly unfamiliar to Caird, born and raised in London but whose mother is from Wisconsin in the USA, where the film was shot. “Farms are are so little understood by the urban dweller, of which our society is becoming increasingly dominated by,” states Caird in HALFWAY’s press release. "By, in essence, sending my protagonist to a farm to cleanse him, I want to show an American Dream story of social movement and rejection of his past transgresses through physical hard work in this new and alien environment."

Caird hasn’t forgotten his London Film School roots either, and recruited Filmmaking Cohort 168 graduate Karel Van Bellingen as Editor and Benjamin Thomas as Director of Photography, while employing East London-based post production facility Okay Studio, owned by LFS graduates Nikolaj Belzer and Henry Lloyd-Baker.

The combined effort of both cast and crew was given its world premiere at the 10th annual Dallas International Film Festival in the Best Narrative Feature Competition, and has gone on to produce a long list of further festival selections:

On its travels, HALFWAY has also picked up a couple of awards, including winner of Best Narrative Feature at the 5th Annual Julien Dubuque International Film Festival.  Most impressive of all its accolades, however, came at the 17th Annual Woodstock Film Festival.  In a room in New York full of industry heavyweights that included Academy Award winners, HALFWAY walked away with the Ultra Indie Award.

With more to come for HALFWAY, regular updates can be found on its Facebook and Twitter pages.

Written by Ben Corbett

Photo Credit: Benjamin Thomas