An RS Productions, Shoreline Films Production
An RS Productions & Shoreline Films production
in association with Freedonia Films & Zentropa Entertainments
FROZEN
35mm Colour 90 minutes
With Shirley Henderson, Roshan Seth,
Ger Ryan, Richard Armitage, Ralf Little, Jamie Sives, Shireen Shah, Sean Harris, LyndseyMarshal, RebeccaPalmer
World Sales Agent: Trust Film Sales
“A thoughtful, beautiful film that puts Shirley Henderson’s capability as a female lead beyond question.””
THE GUARDIAN
“In McKoen’s subtle hands Frozen becomes a poem.”
THE TIMES
“A beautifully stark film. Recommended.”
THE BBC
“This well-crafted British film sees the first true lead role for this excellent Scottish actress.”
TIME OUT LONDON
WINNER – Kodak Cinematography Award - Slamdance 2005
RUNNER-UP Audience Award Slamdance 2005
SPECIAL JURY MENTION – Films de Femmes Creteil 2005
SILVER JURY AWARD – Houston Worldfest 2005
SPECIAL JURY MENTION – Britspotting Berlin 2005
BBC AUDIENCE AWARD FOR BEST FEATURE – Commonwealth Festival 2005
BEST FEATURE FILM – Dubrovnik International Film Festival 05
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY – Dubrovnik International Film Festival 2005
RUNNER-UP GOLDEN SPACE NEEDLE AWARD FOR BEST ACTRESS – Seattle International Film Festival 2005
Frozen Reviews
“For those of us in professional despair about the future of British cinema, there was precious little to gripe about. Juliet McKoen’s ghost story, Frozen, is a brave choice. It gives Shirley Henderson, so often the viola player in a string quartet, the chance to show how haunting she can be as a lead. In McKoen’s subtle hands Frozen becomes a poem about the limbo of not-knowing; of not being able to grieve for a loved one who keeps calling in dreams; and how this appalling ache reshapes the place where you live and the people you grow up with. It is also an exceedingly topical film about how horror is becalmed.”
The Times, November 2004
“A thoughtful, beautiful film that puts Shirley Henderson’s capability as a female lead beyond question.”
Gareth McLean, Guardian Weekend Magazine
“Henderson is such an engaging and gifted actress that we can't take our eyes off her. Meanwhile, McKoen captures it with a real eye for beauty – each frame looks like a work of art, using the coastline as another character in the story. As the mystery deepens, McKoen draws us in, revealing the characters slowly enough that we never get ahead of Kath in her quest and adding an ethereal parallel layer in Kath's fantasies.
Rich Cline, Shadows on the Wall
“This well crafted film sees the first true lead role for this excellent, versatile and omnipresent Scottish actress. McKoen makes much photographically of the grim mud flats and decaying industry of this north-western corner.”
Time Out London
“McKoen, who has an eye for the poetic, alternates between shooting formats, using her locations in atmospheric and often ingenious fashions.”
Geoffrey McNab, Screen International
“Henderson's performance is childlike and her seeming innocence increases our fears for her wellbeing. In contrast, Roshan Seth is the very essence of stillness and maturity in what is an excellent performance. McKoen shows a skill for finding the heart of a place, for pinpointing the mood and it is a beautifully stark film. Recommended.”
Alex Crawford, BBC
“One of the new group of emerging British directors whose films are bound to resonate… The debut feature Frozen from Juliet McKoen is a strikingly beautiful film.
Online reviews, Carnival Askew
“A surreal and evocative tale… Shirley Henderson's acting is excellent. From childlike to erotic, from sad to simply fucked up, she has a ageless quality about her that immediately garners sympathy from the audience. While Frozen may not be the fast-paced thriller that resolves all of the lingering questions in an easy manner, it is a surreal meditation on grief and death. ”
Anji Milanovic, Plume Noir
”Mysterious and chilling, the film reminded me of Blow Up a bit in that it deals with images (in this case video images) and what we see and what we think we see based on our own state of mind.”
Matt Langdon, Filmcritic.com
“An emotionally energetic drama and a haunting meditation on the impermanence of existence. Led by the unflinching immediacy of Henderson’s performance, which is bold and evocatively unpredictable, Henderson shines in Juliet McKoen’s subtle script and direction.”
ShazBennett, American Film Institute Festival
“Depicting visions of worlds both imagined and realistically everyday, Frozen is the strikingly beautiful debut feature from Juliet McKoen. Shirley Henderson’s natural, casually engaging performances are always eye catching. Supported by a strong cast of recognisable British talent, she's reliably terrific here.”
Michael Hayden, London International Film Festival
FOR FURTHER PUBLICITY INFORMATION & STILLS CONTACT:
Kerry Kolbe: +44 (0) 1229 838592
+44 (0) 7745 283762
Trust Film Sales: Fusun Eriksen
(+45) 3686 8788
PRODUCER CONTACT DETAILS:
Mark Lavender:+44 (0)191 224 4301
+44 (0)7710 064 632
Press Kit Contents
Short Synopsisp5
Production Notesp6
Castp9
Director’s Notesp13
The Filmmakersp17
Credit Listp21
Synopsis
Frozen
35mm 90 mins UK 2004
Frozen, the first feature of award-winning director Juliet McKoen, is an evocative, layered film that lets the audience decide whether it’s a psychological thriller, a murder mystery or ghost story.
Set in the stark beauty of Morecambe Bay, north west England, Frozen is a story about unresolved loss and the inherent danger of hope turning into obsession.
In a performance of “unflinching immediacy”, Shirley Henderson (Intermission, Harry Potter,Bridget Jones) plays Kath, a woman still haunted by the mysterious disappearance of her sister Annie two years earlier. When she steals a security camera videotape from the police that captures Annie’s last moments, Kath believes she finds a mysterious image on it. As she retraces Annie’s last steps, she has recurring visions of Annie in an otherworldly landscape. Whilst Kath becomes increasingly convinced that her sister is trying to reach her, those around her become increasingly sceptical of her claims.
So has Kath really found a way to access the afterlife. Or is she losing her grip on reality? And what exactly did happen to Annie?
Frozen, a lyrical film about the impermanence of existence, blurs the lines between perception and reality right up to its final climactic moments.
Production Notes
“A disappearance, unlike a death, frustrates and tantalizes because of its lack of closure. The missing person becomes a creation of memory and imagination, both outside time and time’s victim. There is never a chance to definitively mourn.”
Jason Cowley, Unknown Pleasures
Frozen is the feature film debut of Juliet McKoen, director of the award-winning short Mavis and the Mermaid. A psychological thriller about a young woman’s attempt to unravel the mystery of her sister’s disappearance two years earlier, it stars Shirley Henderson (Intermission; Harry Potter 2 & 4; Trainspotting; 24 Hour Party People) and Roshan Seth (Such a Long Journey; Monsoon Wedding; Gandhi; My Beautiful Launderette).
Written by Juliet McKoen, Frozen is the first collaboration between Lars von Trier’s Danish production company Zentropa and an English company with a female director. The film was shot predominantly on location in Fleetwood, Lancashire, on High Definition.
With a strong supporting cast including Ralf Little (24-Hour Party People; The Royle Family), Jamie Sives (Wilbur wants to Kill Himself) and Sean Harris (also 24-Hour Party People), the film is the culmination of a series of personal works produced by Juliet McKoen which explore the people and places of Morecambe Bay. The central image of the film is the Bay’s dangerous but seductively beautiful, frozen landscape, which haunts the lead character Kath and serves as a visual representation of her emotional state.
Produced by Mark Lavender, Frozen is co-produced by Jim Hickey of Freedonia Films and co-financed by Zentropa Entertainments. The film has been financed through the support of Scottish Screen, Film London, Northern Film and Media and North West Vision. Trust Film Sales, Zentropa’s sister company, is handling the film’s international sales.
Shot, ironically, during the hottest summer in the UK for decades, Frozen continues to explore the director’s preoccupation with the terrible beauty of Morecambe Bay.
It was the well-publicised ‘Lady in the Lake’ case at nearby Coniston Water, where the weighted body of a woman murdered 20 years earlier was discovered by divers and her husband became the key suspect, along with thoughts triggered by a newspaper article about the unresolved loss of a loved one that sowed the seeds for Frozen in Juliet McKoen’s mind nearly three years ago.
She explains: “The starting point was this powerful and poetic article called Salvaging the Sacred, in which Marion Partington, cousin of Martin Amis, describes the emotional effects of her sister Lucy being missing for 21 years (Lucy was eventually discovered to be one of the victims of husband and wife serial killers Fred and Rose West).
“This article lay dormant in my mind until a woman’s body was fished out of Coniston, the nearest lake to my home in Cumbria. She quickly became known as the ‘Lady in the Lake’ and was later confirmed as the wife of a local schoolteacher who had disappeared 20 years ago, leaving two small children. Their father, who has been questioned several times by the police, still shops in my local supermarket.
“It was when a friend, who works in the probation service locally, told me that the ‘Lady in the Lake’s’ sister had also been murdered, that the two stories coalesced in my mind. What, I wondered, was it in a family that caused two sisters to meet the same, statistically unlikely, fate? What must it feel like to have a sister, missing without trace?”
The central image of the film, that of a seductively beautiful, often underwater, frozen landscape, is owed to Marion Partington:
“It’s difficult to find words to describe the pain and disorientation of
someone simply disappearing without trace. It’s a bit like trying to
search for a body that is trapped somewhere beneath the frozen
Arctic Ocean. As the freeze continues, there is no sign of a thaw,
no sign of a seal hole. The features of that world become distorted
as the seasons pass and the ice builds up, and you have to go
inside and get warm if you want to survive.”
And so Kath, in the film, is haunted by images of ice and water. These images function both as a kind of flashback, similar to those experienced by sufferers from post- traumatic stress disorder, and also as a visualisation of her emotional state.
They were filmed in a cold but sunny March 2003, in the Swedish Arctic Circle, by the director and an underwater cameraman, who was persuaded to don a dry-suit and break through the ice of a frozen quarry to film what lay beneath.
The estuary vision sequences in Frozen were shot miles out in Morecambe Bay, only a couple of miles away from the spot where, a few months later, 23 Chinese cocklers lost their lives when they were cut off by the tide.
Capturing these scenes in the Bay involved an army of local fishermen, tractors, and four wheel drives to guide cast and crew out safely onto the chosen location, and their local knowledge was vital to avoid the well-documented dangers of the quicksands, lightning quick tides and churning gulleys with their deadly currents.
The bleakly beautiful industrial landscapes (both interior and exterior) of Fleetwood are also integral to the film. All the places featured in the film are real and as they are. Production design concentrated on ‘truth to materials’, a belief in preserving the integrity of the real and not swamping it with objects from prop houses or designer’s whimsies.
The Frozen production offices were based in C&G Neve’s factory, the largest fish processing plant in Fleetwood, where all of the fish factory scenes were also filmed.
Shot on High Definition DV in Fleetwood, Lancashire, Edinburgh and Sweden, Frozen explores the landscapes of the CCTV security camera image and subverts the thriller genre to examine twin themes of loss and obsession, perception and reality.
The Cast
Shirley Henderson (Kath Swarbrick)
Shirley Henderson takes her first major lead role in Frozen after playing successful leading roles in recent features including Intermission (2003), Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself (2003), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), 24-Hour Party People (2002) and Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001).
Henderson is well known to British television audiences for her role as Isobel in the popular television series Hamish Macbeth (BBC1), in which she starred alongside Robert Carlyle, and as Queen Catherine of Braganza in the BBC production of Charles II.
Shirley became attached to Frozen relatively early on in the writing process and director Juliet McKoen was keen for her to have a strong influence in forming and refining the film from then onwards.
Juliet says: “As well as being a joy to work with, she is a superlative artist, has a passionate work ethic and can offer a director an almost dizzying choice of emotional range. She literally lives the part moment by moment, and for almost seven weeks I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I heard her speak in her native Scottish instead of her adopted Fleetwood accent.
“Interestingly, Shirley is, like me, the eldest of three sisters. I cast Natalie Henderson, Shirley’s sister, as Kath’s sister Annie and Natalie remained with us on set throughout the shoot as colleague, confederate, stand-in and support for Shirley in what is certainly her most physically and emotionally demanding lead role to date.”
Shirley was awarded the Prix Mademoiselle Ladubay Best Actress Prize at the 2003 Angers Film Festival for her performance in a short film called The Girl in the Red Dress, directed by Aletta Collins, and she won critical acclaim for her portrayal of Leonora Braham in Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy, for which she received a best actress nomination from the Film Critic’s Circle.
Of taking up her first leading role in Frozen, Shirley says: “The thought of it was frightening because it’s a big role and I have to kind of persuade people to go on this journey with me, but I love the story and I love the mystery of it.
“It’s about that ache in your heart that you can’t stop until you get an answer – while everybody else is fine and telling you that time will heal, it isn’t fine until you get that answer. That idea of something missing and unresolved is really powerful.”
Roshan Seth (Noyen Roy)
Roshan Seth plays parish priest Noyen Roy, who is led to question both his faith in the beliefs of the church and the strength of marital love after becoming entangled with an increasingly disturbed Kath. The role of Noyen was written for Roshan by director Juliet, who had admired the actor’s performance in Such a Long Journey (1998).
She says: “I saw and admired Roshan Seth as Gustad in Such a Long Journey for which he deservedly won a Genie (the Canadian Oscar) and decided I had to work with him. I wrote the part of Noyen for him and was delighted when he accepted the part having read a very, very early draft of the script. He too brought tremendous thought and subtlety to the project and was a constant charm and joy to have on set.”
“I was particularly interested in how the differing strengths of the two lead actors would play against each other – Shirley’s quick, nervous energy against Roshan’s talent for stillness and calm and their shared, though contrasting, aura of personal vulnerability. I wanted to exploit these differences but also suggest that somewhere between them lay a deeper, underlying similarity which explains their attraction to one another.”
Roshan got on board the project when the script was in its early stages after the unlikely, doomed love affair between Kath and Noyen piqued his interest.
He says: “I found the theme of longing and not being able to get what you long for particularly interesting, as well as what TS Elliot called ‘the awful daring of a moment’s surrender’ – that one moment when you surrender to living completely in the now.
“For me that is the fullness of everything, and for the rest of the time we’re merely playing these rather uptight roles. After years of playing the role of the carer and priest, Noyen lets his feelings take over instead of keeping them buried. When he seizes the moment with Kath it thaws something inside him. But it also turns everything he believes in upside down.”
Born and educated in India, Roshan trained as an actor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. His early career began in England, but he returned to India in 1977 and has lived in New Delhi ever since while continuing to pursue an international career in Britain, the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and India.
Combining film and TV work with stage performances, Roshan Seth has starred in dozens of productions over the past 30 years. As well as receiving a Genie for his role in Such a Long Journey he was nominated for a BAFTA in 1982 for Gandhi.