Maybe (1969) 10 mins
A gentle film on the engine man of the Northumbria Ferry that crossed the River Tyne between North Shields and South Shields carrying workers, shoppers and kids against the busy river and its industrial landscape. The film was prevented from broadcast by BBC North East who requested the song Sair Fyeld Hinny - an old man’s song to his wife performed by traditional Tyneside singer Louis Killen - be removed for being unintelligible.
Launch (1974) 10 mins
Made for just £400, this impressionistic film captures the life of shipbuilding communities working on the North East's shipyards. At the end of a Wallsend Street, it follows the build up to the launch of World Unicorn, one of a series of oil tankers built by Swan Hunter.
High Row (1974) 33 mins
A docu-drama collaboration between Amber and coalminers at a small drift mine, high in the Pennines, near Alston in Cumbria, it progressed from an earlier script rejected by miners ("If it was like that, we wouldn’t work here"). Filming in cramped conditions, with members of the production team participating in the work process, Amber rented the mine for a week, and paid the men to act out the script that reconstructed their working day.
Bowes Line (1975) 28 mins
Built in the 1820s to link Kibblesworth Colliery with Jarrow Staithes where coal was loaded on to ships, this film focuses on Matty and Luke, two of the workers on the rope-hauled railway where full coal wagons were used to pull empty ones to the top of the hill before they were sent on to the colliery.
Last Shift (1976) 17 mins
Untouched by the industrial revolution, this short depicts life at a handmade brickworks in Swalwell on the south bank of the Tyne where a handful of men produced high quality refractory bricks, a disappearing practice. With the brickworks having just closed and the owners either unaware or unconcerned, Amber employed the workers for a further week so that their processes could be documented.
Part of a season on Amber Film Collective’s documentaries
Showing as part of this season: Early Shorts (1969-1974), Byker (1983) + Today I’m With You (2010), T Dan Smith (1987) + Shorts, From Marks & Spencer to Marx and Engels (1988) + From Us to Me (2016), Writing in the Sand (1991) + Shorts
Presented by Wavelength
F: facebook.com/wavelengthdocs
T: @wavelengthdocs
dir. Amber
year: 1969-74
country: UK
total run-time: 98 minutes
Doors 2pm
Film 2:30pm
£6.00/Concessions (Pay What You Can)
“Alongside Ken Loach, Amber are the last great (working) class warriors of British film... They make movies in the north-east about a way of life that is rapidly disappearing, and one that is rarely represented on screen: sea coalers, fishermen, harness racers are just a few of the subjects they have tackled over the past 30 years. But there is more to their movies than history. They are funny and moving, political and challenging, and as real as it gets.”
“Part-art cinema, part-documentary, Amber’s evolving humanist aesthetic has produced a body of work that in its integrity, honesty and commitment, remains one of the great unsung achievements of British cinema.”
“The often strikingly unreconstructed and old-school north-east working-class culture is one which Amber’s films and photography has documented, chronicled, celebrated and dramatised over the past 47 years”