Amiel Courtin-Wilson Hail

Hail

Cast: Leanne Campbell, Daniel P. Jones, Tony Markulin
Director: Amiel Courtin-Wilson
Genre: Drama
Rated: R
Running Time: 103 minutes

Synopsis: Fresh from jail, 50-year-old Dan is reunited with the love of his life, Leanne, and announces he finally wants to go straight. A fierce, tender couple who appreciate the simplest pleasures in life, Dan finds a job in a local car yard but after an accident they are both lured back to petty crime to survive.

When an old criminal friend of Leanne's appears with a job for Dan that could finally provide for the woman he loves, a terrible act occurs and Leanne is torn away from him. Alone and haunted, Dan plunges into a savage hallucinatory journey of revenge to take back what is his.

A searing, intimate story of love, loss and chaos, Hail is a visionary maelstrom unlike anything you have seen before.

Director's Statement
Hail is the culmination of my intensely personal 6 year collaboration with Daniel P. Jones.

I first met Danny in mid 2005 while shooting a documentary about Plan B, a Melbourne theatre company founded to rehabilitate ex-prison inmates through performance. Danny had been released the previous day and arrived at a Plan B rehearsal to take part in that year's performance. I was instantly taken by his mercurial storytelling ability, his inky black sense of humour and his unique turn of phrase. As the weeks went by, I recorded him rehearsing several scenes with the other men in the group and his intensity on stage was striking.

We slowly got to know each other and after six months of shooting, Danny and I become close friends. As I had met Danny in the context of a very collaborative, improvisational theatre group, it was easy to ask him if he wanted to make the leap to film. Danny was thrilled.

In 2006 I started conducting in-depth interviews with Danny about his childhood, life on the streets and life in jail. It was around that time that he first told me the story that unfolds in the short film entitled CICADA. I was moved to tears by his experience as a 5-year-old and when I spoke to Danny about the impact it had on him, he quoted Oscar Wilde: 'We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Per Ardua Ad Astra …'

This was a pivotal moment in my collaboration with Danny as it inspired me to develop a process that was also used in the shooting of Hail. I interviewed Danny, transcribed that material, edited it, then fed it back to him as honed dialogue in the context of dramatic scenes. In this way Danny was able to truly own the material while performing, thereby transcending the all too common problem of non-actors being given dialogue that never really sits comfortably with them.

This working methodology proved highly successful with CICADA premiering internationally at Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2009 as well as winning and being nominated for several major awards in Australia. Hail was the exciting next step in our creative relationship and it has become a life changing experience.

When I first met producer Michael Cody in 2008 we instantly connected over our respective love of a very particular kind of risk taking in cinema. We quickly became friends and began working on each others projects - this eventually lead to co-founding Flood projects, a filmmaking collective which has so far produced my short film CICADA, Michael's short Foreign Parts which premiered at Clermont-Ferrand in 2010 and most recently my feature documentary Ben Lee: Catch My Disease which premiered at Melbourne International Film Festival in 2011. Other Flood Projects members include some of Australia's most promising emerging filmmakers including director Amy Gebhardt, editor Peter Sciberras and cinematographers Germain McMicking and Adam Arkapaw.

As a creative producer, it was Michael who was instrumental in not only rigorously interrogating the themes of the treatment for Hail as it developed but also being more than willing to embrace an all too organic approach to the shooting methodology which enabled the real world to bleed into the constructs of the narrative wherever possible.

Since my first documentary, Chasing Buddha, I have developed a fascination with how people maintain a sense of hope in the face of adversity and how they manage to transform themselves when faced with crushing circumstances. I am also fascinated by moments of profound emotional, intellectual and sensory overload. The kind of experiences that take a lifetime to unpack but can never quite be encapsulated in a single sitting - epiphanies that are difficult to apprehend though ever present over the course of one's life.

Dealing with the themes of love, loss and renewal, Hail is a grand love story borne of survival- it eschews sentimentality in deference to the reality of the characters' lives.

In Hail the line between cinema and life is at times erased, not just for the audience but for the characters/people in the film as well.

As Daniel and his real life partner Leanne Letch play themselves in the lead roles of the film, HAIL is in part a distillation of the last five years of Daniel's life post release from prison- combined with visceral fictional elements that take an audience on a metaphysical descent into an abyss of grief and violence. Exploring the extremities of human experience, at its heart Hail is a delicately observed love story driven by the undeniable charm and magnetism of its two main characters Danny and Leanne. I feel truly privileged to have assembled such an amazing team of collaborators and performers to inspire, provoke and ultimately realise my vision for Hail

Release Date: October 25th, 2012
Website: www.hailmovie.com