Bait

Bait is a British feature film, shot on hand-processed 16mm film produced entirely in Cornwall in 2017 and 2018. It premiered at the 2019 Berlinale film festival where it was received rapturously by critics and audience. Mark Kermode called it "a genuine modern masterpiece, one of the defining British films of the decade” in The Guardian. From there it played over 30 international film festivals, winning 8 awards (+10 nominations). Over a six-month period from July 2019 the film was released in over 380 UK cinema screens taking over £500,000 (from over 70,000 admissions) at the box office by the time of the COVID-19 cinema shutdown in March 2020. In February 2020 the film won the BAFTA for Best Debut for Falmouth researcher Mark Jenkin who wrote, shot, edited and directed the film. It was nominated for a further BAFTA award in the Best British Film category and elsewhere won the Screen International Award for Best British Film of the year, the Philip French breakthrough filmmaker award at the London Film Critics Circle awards and a British Independent Film Award for the producers, Early Day Films.

The film marks a continuation in Mark’s work over the past decade, seeking to investigate questions of Cornish identity and contemporary Kernow politics, as well as Cornwall’s position in a wider British and global late capitalism context. Bait is, in this regard, a culmination of a period of creative research that includes the recent short films Enough To Fill An Eggcup (2016) and The Essential Cornishman (2016), poetic essay works focusing on Cornish fishing histories and legacies, and Bronco’s House (2015), a short feature that revolves around the housing crisis in the county. The themes in these works are drawn out for deeper investigation in Bait. Mark uses the film form to instigate tactile emotional resonances for audiences and by taking control of the entire artistic processes of the film is able to present works that represent his political viewpoint, his desire to create enquiries into social inequities and ultimately his interest in the complexities of human interaction in late capitalist culture.

• https://youtu.be/eVlPl0SXFiE