Black Swan

This is the short I graduated from Uni with.
You can really feel my surrealist and experimental influences here! 5 years later... I'm working on a feature inspired by this story :)



UK 2007
Director: Fiona Cross
With Amith Rahman (previously known as Abraham Chowdhury) and James Horseman


Once upon a time, there was a very ugly duckling, unloved and rejected by his family and society. The lonesome bird grew strong and bitter, plotting a way to get back at society for what it had made of him.
Black swan reflects on what has pushed our society to create its own ugly ducklings. Transferring this tale onto the London life style today has proven itself to be more than successful, playing with the audiences’ conceptions and stereotypes. Saeed is first introduced as a young Muslim, whose faith has given him the strength to go and achieve his goal. Although this isn’t made clear, through his journey across central London, it is strongly believed he is on his way to join the line of terrorist attacks. But what is it that actually convinced us that this was who he was? This deaf and dreamy character in a white skin would not have seemed more innocent. And here comes Peter James, a disturbed attention seeker who thinks the whole world is against him. So, when a London station does blow up, and Saeed is in that station confronted by Peter James, our prejudice and maybe unconscious racism is forced forward. By focusing on who might be a potential suspect, we forgot to look at who showed obvious signs of danger. The grown ugly duckling, now an oddly graceful black swan, has finally found a way of getting back at society from ignoring him for such a long time.
The directors’ third short has taken a more experimental and political turn. The style is striking yet gritty with some beautiful locations such as the Woking mosque, the oldest of the whole of Britain. The sound inspired by French film “Sur mes Levres” supports the quirkiness of the fast editing and the montage sequence. The colours have subtly been edited to fit Saeed modified vision of the world around him, increasing the peculiar feeling, the world we know but some is somehow difficult to recognise.
Her surrealist influences lead her ideas and the narrative of this short reflect this with some recurrent landmarks already such as the montage/day dream sequence and the strong aesthetic presence of nature.
Far from the fairy tale aspect, the film however remains poetic and unpretentious with the integration of all members of the crew passing in front of the camera at one point in the film so as to prove that they are not above the audience and that they would have probably made the same mistake.
Black Swan is a tender yet abstract and disturbing short which pulls us all out momentarily of our reality and pushes us into this dark, prosaic and political position, forcing us to loose trust in our own thoughts.